Olive

A Global History
Fabrizia Lanza
the edi ble seri es
oii\r
Edible
Series Editor: Andrew F. Smith
rririr is a revolutionary new series of books dedicated to food and
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Olive
A Global History
Fabrizia Lanza
rr:k+io rooks
Published by Reaktion Books Ltd
,, Great Sutton Street
London rc+\or,tk
www.reaktionbooks.co.uk
First published .o++
Copyright Fabrizia Lanza .o++
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British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
Lanza, Fabrizia
Olive: a global history. (Edible)
+. Olive. .. Olive History.
,. Cooking (Olives)
. Olive Folklore.
i. Title ii. Series
o+., o,-rc..
isr,-s+so+s,sos
Introduction 7
1 The Ancient Roots of the Olive 12
2 Ointments, Anointments and Holy Oil:
The Olive in Ritual 29
3 Harvesting, Pressing and Curing 47
4 The Olive Meets the New World 65
5 Good Fat and Bad Fat:
The Mediterranean Diet 76
Recipes 87
Appendix: Olive Varieties 106
References 111
Select Bibliography 115
Websites and Associations 117
Acknowledgements 119
Photo Acknowledgements 120
Index 121
Contents
-
The olives history is almost as ancient as that of humanity
itself. An olive tree does not reach its full productivity for ,
years and it is a plant that can endure for centuries. Who was
the rst person patient enough to wait those three decades?
Whoever he or she was, we know that the olive has been
growing alongside human beings from time immemorial. It
lives in our literature, it is part of our symbolism, it lights our
prayers and it enriches both our culture and our diet.
The wild species of the plant seems to have been discov-
ered at least +o,ooo years rcr, and the domesticated version
appeared some ,ooo years ago. It is a story that goes back at
least to the beginnings of agriculture, when human beings
rst settled down and began to cultivate the earth and har-
vest its fruits. To trace in just one brief volume the long,
long story of the olive, its symbolic signicance and the
technical skills that had to be mastered in order to press the
oil and cure the olives, is thus to undertake a voyage o,ooo
years long. It is an entertaining voyage, during which an
almost innite number of tales and legends emerge, a multi -
tude of customs and traditions that belong to many different
places and civilizations. These cultures may be far away from
our own in time and place but they all attributed to the olive
Introduction
s
a high, even regal status, a value well beyond the plants
dietary or cosmetic uses.
Homer, Virgil, Cato, Pliny, Aristophanes, Dante, Shakes -
peare, Frdric Mistral, Van Gogh, Calvino: many poets,
scientists, artists and historians have admired the olive tree,
granting it the status of a genuine icon of the Western world.
To be born under an olive tree was a mark of divine ancestry:
the twins Artemis and Apollo as well as Romulus and Remus,
descended from the gods, were born under an olive tree.
Olive wood, signalling endurance and quality, often appears
during Odysseus endless travels: his bed is carved from an
ancient olive tree, the stick thrust into the Cyclops eye is
made of olive wood, and so is the handle of the axe with
which he builds his boat.
From time immemorial, anointing oneself with oil has
been the preferred way to approach the hereafter. Unguents,
mixtures of oils and spices, were sacred to the Babylonians
and to the prophets of the Bible; they were essential during the
burial of ancient Greek athletes and warriors; and they played
an integral role in the Christian sacraments. In the Middle
Ages, holy oil, precious and deeply sacred, was said to ow
directly from the bones of Christian martyrs. Almost as pow -
er ful in modern times is the way imported olive oil subtly
conveyed a sense of identity to European immigrants in the
United States, satisfying, along with their appetites for avours
from home, their nostalgia and other intangible desires.
An overview of these six millennia of history must obvi -
ously begin with a brief excursus on the olive tree itself, from
pre-history to modern times a multiform and complicated
story of the ships that sailed the waves of the Mediterranean
back and forth, rst from East to West, and slowly conquered
all of Europe. The second chapter traces the symbolic role the
olive and its oil have always played, from rituals in Egyptian
,
and Etruscan tombs, to the Christian sacraments, to the rit uals
celebrated in the past century in Provence and central Italy
during the olive harvest. A third chapter is dedicated to the
history of oil extraction from the earliest mortars in which the
olives were crushed, to primitive presses, often of industrial
dimensions even in ancient times, to the more sophisticated
machines of the nineteenth century. Curiously enough, the
knowledge and skills related to olive cultivation, harvest and
pressing that were accumulated by the ancient Romans and
lost for centuries during the Middle Ages reemerged, like an
underground spring, in modern times. In the fourth chapter
I write about the olives migration to the New World with the
arrival of the Spanish empire in South America. Once the olive
had established itself in the fertile soils of California, it was
largely the immigrants from Mediterranean countries who
took charge of it, delighted to have this memory of home in
a far-away land. The book concludes with some questions
about the Mediterranean Diet, those dietary recommendations
that, beginning in the +,os, brought with them a new idea
about the benecial effects of olive oil. Could it be that behind
this newfound passion for olive oil there are motivations that
go far beyond the dietetic and medical arguments made by sci -
en tists, doctors and dietary experts? Are there more profound
reasons why we favour olive oil? These are tantalizing questions.
There are many, many recipes made with olive oil, some-
what fewer that employ the olive fruit. In giving recipes Ive
taken a thematic approach, offering cross-country compari sons
of how olive oil becomes the base for a sauce, for example: to
make aioli in Provence, or pesto in Liguria. Bread dipped in oil
is a basic element of the Mediterranean Diet, whether it is
called bruschetta in Rome, brissa in Nice or fettunta in Tuscany.
Finally, olive oil is still the preferred fat in some traditional
Southern European sweets and desserts, a custom that gives
Broccoli with black olives. For recipe, see p. +oo.
Cassatelle, Sicilian
ricotta-stuffed pastries
made with olive oil.
For recipe, see pp.
+o.
these dishes a decidedly Mediterranean texture and a avour
that is far from French-style patisserie made with butter.
And so our travels, begun thousands of years ago between
the Tigris and the Euphrates, bring us to the cassatelle of Sicily,
the melomakarona of Greece. To Australia, to Asia: where will
the olive take us next?
++
+.
The entire Mediterranean seems to rise out of the sour, pungent
taste of black olives between the teeth. A taste older than meat
and wine, a taste as old as cold water. Only the sea itself seems as
ancient a part of the region as the olives and its oil, that like no
other products of nature, have shaped civilisations from remotest
antiquity to the present.
Laurence Durrell, Prosperos Cell
It isnt easy to identify the precise moment when the wild
olive or oleaster, a spiny, ungainly bush, rst appeared. Wild
olives were certainly growing all along the Mediterranean
coast many thousands of years ago. Olive stones from the
Paleolithic era have been found in southern France, the Py r-
enees and Germany. An olive stone unearthed in Spain has
been carbon-dated to oooo rcr.
The oleaster, with its tiny black inedible berries, bears no
resemblance to Olea europea, the domesticated olive tree with
its pulpy, translucent fruits and majestic allure. O. europea can
tolerate long periods of drought but not too much cold and
not for long periods. It will grow happily where temperatures
do not fall below +.r (-sc) and at an altitude which varies
according to latitude: in Sicily olives grow on Mount Etna up
1
The Ancient Roots of the Olive
The best olive oil is made from olives that have been harvested when
still unripe.
+
to ,oo m above sea level, while in central Italy they are not
found above ,oo to oo m. According to the rules laid down by
the ancient Greek scientist Theophrastus, olives should never
be cultivated more than , kilometres from the sea; thus they
can be found nearly everywhere around the Mediterranean.
As for where and when O. europea was domesticated for
the rst time, we do not know for sure, but it is reasonable
to think that took place somewhere near the Fertile Crescent
where human beings rst domesticated plants and animals.
This stretch of land around the Tigris and Euphrates rivers
runs west through Syria to Lebanese shores, and south toward
Adelaide Leone,
Oleaster.
the African desert, where the land is periodically irrigated by
the ood waters of the Nile.
+
The most ancient evidence of olive domestication, cul -
ti vation and trade has been found in the regions of Syria,
Pal es tine and Crete. From what we know, olive cultivation
developed independently in these three places. The linguistic
spread of the two main words which have designated the
olive since ancient times the Greek elea and the Semitic zeit
supports this theory.
.
The various names of olives and olive
oil around the Mediterranean derive from those two words:
we nd elea and its occidental translation, olea, all over Europe
and the Western world. Meanwhile the Semitic word zeit,
trace able to Syria, was adopted by the Egyptians and then by
the Arabs, who spread it widely with their conquest.
Whatever the precise place of origin, it was along the dry
and sunny shores of the Mediterranean Sea that the olive tree
grew leafy and prosperous. When the Flood recounted in the
Bible ended, a dove carrying an olive branch appeared to
Noah as a sign that the deluge was nished (Genesis s:++).
+
The Fertile Crescent.
This and numerous other biblical references to olive trees and
olive oil suggest that long before the Bible was composed
olive trees were probably already growing on Mount Ararat
and were cultivated by Semitic peoples. In the second millen-
nium rcr, not far from Mount Ararat, Prince Hammurabi of
the Babylonian Empire laid down very strict rules regarding
commerce in olive oil, indicating that the olive already had
great economic signicance.
Moving west to archaic Greece, around ,oo rcr, what
was probably a wilder version of the tree we know today was
also intensively cultivated on the island of Crete. After .ooo
rcr, olive oil began to play a major role in the islands economy
as the trees cultivation expanded and became more system-
atic. In the Knossos palace, identied as the home of the fabled
Minotaur, large deposits of enormous pithoi (amphorae), two
metres high and used for oil storage, have been found. In the
ancient Cretan city of Phaistos, excavators have found remains
of an olive press and clay tablets that were marked with the
provenance and destination of the oil, which was sold all over
+o
Olive tree, Sicily.
the Mediterranean and especially to Egypt. Areas such as this,
devoted to the storage of olive oil and its commerce, demon-
strate that oil was one of the pillars of the Minoan economic
system on Crete.
Still farther west, in Egypt, under the reign of Ramses ii,
(+.-,+.+.+,rcr) we nd a record of the donations made
in oil produced from an olive grove measuring .,-oo hectares.
This plantation was near the town of Heliopolis, and the oil
produced was donated to the sun-god Ra to light his sanc -
tuaries. In Ramses tomb as well as in that of Tutankhamen
(c. +,. rcr) surviving frescoes depict vases of olive oil, lux-
urious provisions for the souls voyage to the other world.
+-
Olive trees in the traditional Garden of Gethsemane, on the Mount
of Olives.
+s
The same was true in Greece and Palestine, where olive oil
was held in high esteem: Homer, in the Odyssey, gives perfumed
olive oil a ritual value when he tells of the meeting between
Odysseus and Princess Nausicaa, daughter of Alcinous. Odys -
seus, having reached the shore after a thunderstorm and
completely covered with salt, is washed and prepared for his
meeting with Nausicaa and anointed with olive oil. It is inter-
esting to note that both Homer and Hesiod knew about olive
trees and olive oil and were able to distinguish the wild tree
from the cultivated (Odyssey :--). Nevertheless, they mostly
refer to the olive as a single tree, and for them oil was a per-
fumed balm for the body, never a substance used in cooking
or for food.
It was in Palestine that the domestication of olive trees
and the production of olive oil reached levels never obtained
before in the pre-industrial age. There, an oil press (recently ex -
ca vated near Tel Aviv) was capable of producing up to .,ooo
tons of oil a year. This oil was for lighting and for cosmetic
purposes, and was exported to the Nile region for embalm-
ing and Egyptian funeral rites. In Tel Mique-Ekron, a few
kilometres from Jerusalem, a huge mill for processing olives
that contained a hundred presses has been dated to +ooo rcr
and is thought to be one of the largest industrial complexes
of antiquity.
The oil produced by the Palestinians was then trans-
ported by the Phoenicians with their fast ships throughout the
Medi terranean, beyond Egypt to Cyrenaica, and past Carthage,
competing with the colonists of Magna Graecia for the mar-
kets of Sicily, Sardinia and the Spanish coast. We know that
Phoenician colonists took olive trees with them to the Iberian
Peninsula around soo rcr, and they may have introduced the
olive tree to Sicily and from there, skipping along the shores
of the Mediterranean, to other places in Europe and North
+,
Africa. By the eighth century olives and olive oil were well es-
tablished along the length and breadth of the Mediterranean.
By this time, the importance of the olive tree in the Greek
economy was such that the olive had acquired a mythical
status. In a very famous Greek tale, Athena and Poseidon were
competing for supremacy in Attica. Before the council of
gods, the two had to think of a gift to give the region. Posei-
don gave a white horse and with a violent gesture created a
salted lake. Athena gave birth to an olive tree on the highest
hill in the region. The people chose Athenas gift and named
their city after her. According to legend, during the Persian
invasion of so rcr the olive tree on the Acropolis burned
down. But the next day the tree put out a new shoot and was
still alive in the second century.
From then onward, Athenas gift became a sort of national
symbol in ancient Greece, with olive leaves impressed on
coins, and wreaths of olive branches awarded to the athlete
who won the Hecatombaion, a major competition held every
A clay skyphos (two-handled wine cup) depicting the owl, symbol of
Athena, surrounded by olive branches, th century rcr, Puglia.
A sard seal-stone engraved with an athlete, nude except for drapery over
his right arm, holding an olive branch; a draped Victory crowns him with
an olive wreath, ,.,rcr,+ rcr.
four years after o rcr in Athenas honour. The prizes for
the pan-Athenian games included money, gold and silver
medals and large decorated amphorae containing olive oil.
,
The sacred olive trees harvested to produce the olive oil for
the com petition were protected under special laws. An Archon
.o
.+
and an Areopagus, high-up ofcials, looked after the trees and
collected the olives, and it was severely forbidden to cut or
damage the sacred trees.
By this time the Greek colonies in Sicily and along the
Ionian coast, like Tarantum and Sybaris, and as far west as
Marseilles, had begun producing olive oil and were soon
competing with the homeland in quality and quantity. Boats
loaded with amphorae full of olive oil continually plied the
Mediterranean.
The planting of olive trees and the use of olive oil spread
to central Italy from the Greek colonies in Italy probably
from Sicily between the eighteenth and fth centuries rcr.
In inland Italy, along the Apennines from the Po plain in the
north to Benevento in the south, the Etruscans began grow-
ing the olive tree. Although these regions may have cultivated
olives previously, olives and olive oil now became one of their
main products, and in just a few decades the Etruscan elite,
learning from Greece and especially from Attica, started using
new products and ingredients and developed new eating habits.
Wine was adopted during the symposium (from the Greek
word sunpinein, which means drink together), where philo -
so phical discussions were enhanced by calibrated doses of
alcohol. The wealthiest Etruscans, considering olive oil a great
luxury, used it mainly as a cosmetic, for burial uses and for
lighting. Around the end of the seventh century the Etruscans
started cultivating their own olive trees and making their own
oil. At that point, olive oil was no longer a costly product and
was within the reach of all. It is probably for this reason that
Etruscan tombs from this period contain an ever increasing
number of tiny oil ampoules and oil lamps. And it was from
the Etruscans that the Romans, under Tarquinius Priscus
reign, learned how to harvest grapes and make wine, how to
cultivate the olive tree, how to judge when the olives were ready
..
for the harvest and what methods to use to press the olives
and produce the best oil.
As the empire grew the Romans planted olives across
Europe, and wherever the climate allowed the plant to grow,
it has remained. Pliny the Elder, who in the rst century rcr
wrote extensively about olives and oil in his Natural History,
records that beginning in the rst century rcr the Roman
Empire was the largest olive oil producer in Europe and that
different varieties of olives were being cultivated as far north
as Gaul and as far west as Spain.

His description of different

grades of olive oil is still valid and demonstrates the great
interest the Romans had in olive oil not only as a balm, but
also, in time, as an important enrichment when cooking and
serving food.
As the Empire expanded, Italian oil production proved
insufcient, and Rome needed more olive oil to satisfy her
demand. Olive oil began to be imported from the provinces
of the Empire as a tax payment. Plutarch would praise Caesar
for the African conquest because it assured Rome three mil-
lion litres of oil per year.
Mount Testaccio is a living monument to this olive oil
trade and distribution. It is an articial hill near the centre of
Rome, some o metres high and about . hectares wide, that
rose out of all the remains of olive oil amphorae that had ar-
rived in Rome between the rst and second century rcr. By
counting the number of amphorae in Testaccio, we can con -
clude that more than ,.o,ooo amphorae were arriving in Rome
each year during the imperial age, the equivalent of ..,so tons.
Considering that Rome had by that time one million inhabi-
tants, each would have consumed about two litres of olive oil
per month, a great deal by the standards of today. But of course
we have to remember that oil was used not only for food but
also for lighting, body care, medicine and engineering.

.,
After the collapse of the Roman Empire the cultivation
of olive trees began to decline. The warm climate that had
accompanied the growth of the Roman Empire was now
changing, and with colder weather northern populations
began to move south. It was now too cold to grow olive trees
in northern countries. Rome was gradually losing control of
the provinces, and of its olive plantations. Italy was under con -
stant invasion by new populations coming from the north in
search of land and a better climate. An age of war, devasta tion
and famine began; trade became impossible. The countryside
was no longer a safe place to live, as barbarian invaders deva -
stated all that stood in their path. Olive plantations were aban-
doned; the population, afraid to move, simply tried to hide away.
The invading populations had different habits and their
own agricultural traditions, and they imposed a new diet on
their Roman descendants. Many brought with them a taste
for beer, lard, meat and milk, from a world of hunting and
forests where olive oil was not produced. For them, olive oil
probably tasted strong and acidic compared with the sweet-
ness of butter. Soon the Romans neat farms and vegetable
gardens, their intensive cultivation of vines and olive trees,
were abandoned and grew up into woodland. Olive oil was
still to be found, but it had once again become an expensive
ingredient available mainly to the aristocracy and to the upper
ecclesiastical ranks.
Meanwhile new invaders from the south, the Arabs, were
extending their dominion across Africa and into Europe. They
seem to have had little interest in planting and spreading the
olive, and they probably got most of their oil from the ex ten -
sive North African groves rst established by the Romans.
Al-Idrisi (+o,,++o/o), one of the most celebrated geogra-
phers at the Norman court of Roger ii in Palermo, wrote a
report on the varieties of plants growing in the kings territory,
but he did not mention olives, except to say he had only seen
them on the island of Pantelleria, south of Sicily.
We shall have to wait until after the year +ooo for olive
oil to be rediscovered, and for new olive plantations to arise.
Against the barbarian culture of lard and meat, monasteries
and the Church promoted and protected a counter-culture
based on olive oil. Christians respected fasting laws and did
not eat animal fat butter, suet or lard for much of the
year. Fasting became more than a rule the faithful must abide
by: it became a symbol of identity, a mark of belonging, a
way for the Christian community to show the antiquity of its
roots and to claim its descent from the Roman culture of the
rst Christian martyrs.
The olive tree, which until then had been secreted behind
the walls of monasteries, protected by the Church and used
for lighting and to impart the sacraments, seems now to have
become fashionable. According to scholars like Massimo Mon -
ta nari,
o
the new oil culture appealed to Europeans, as did that
.
Olive tree on the island of Pantelleria, Italy; the branches, held down by
weights, grow along the ground where they are protected from the wind.
new religion, Christianity, which was now beginning to be
propagated in a Europe that still had a largely pagan soul.
Later, olive oil would cease to be a status symbol or a mark
of religious and cultural identity. It simply became part of
the diet and culinary habits of Italy, southern France and
Spain: the highest-ranking condiment in a culture of vegeta-
bles and salads. Giacomo Castelvetro, born in the Italian re-
gion of Emilia and exiled to London at the beginning of the
seventeenth century because he was a Protestant, considered
veg etables seasoned with olive oil a distinctive feature of his
homeland, for which he felt deep nostalgia. In +o+ he even
wrote a little treatise on the matter, addressed to his London
hosts: Brieve racconto di tutte le radici, di tutte lerbe e di tutti i frutti
che crudi o cotti in Italia si mangiano (A brief account of all the
roots, all the herbs and all the fruits, both raw and cooked,
eaten in Italy).
Before the olive became part of the diet, however, it was
already a mainstay of trade. Travellers at the end of the thirt -
eenth century who ventured south to the land of Bari and
Otranto, in todays Italian region of Puglia, observed that the
landscape was thick with olive trees. Venice would soon de-
velop an important industry importing oil from Puglia to make
soap and provide lamp oil along the Adriatic coast, as well as
to sell to northern Europe.
-
Olive oil became indispensable
in the production of soaps and, via strict laws protecting its
control of the trade, the Venetian Republic was able to impose
itself politically and economically across northern Italy.
New boats, called marciliane, were built for oil transportation:
very light, with a at base, these boats were able to transport
hundreds of barrels of olive oil at a time.
While Venice was consolidating its power in northern
Italy trading soap and olive oil, Florence was developing new
textile products which would become sought after across
.
Olive, from The Tudor
Pattern Book, English
manuscript, c. +.o,o.
Europe. Paris, Bruges, Antwerp, Flanders, London: to all these
places Florence would export its high-quality linens, silks,
cottons and wools, together with wines and olive oil. In
Florence olive oil was used to oil the bres and to comb the
fabrics, because it is the only fat which remains liquid at room
temperature. Because the hills of Tuscany did not provide
enough oil for the textile workshops, they needed to purchase
oil in the south of Italy: from Calabria, Campania and, when
Venice consented, a small portion of the oil from Puglia.
During the Renaissance, oil from southern Italy came to
be fundamental in industry and for lighting. With strong de-
mand coming from all European markets, Venice was in charge
of olive oil supplies from Puglia, while Genoa managed those
from Calabria, along with the Tuscans, Russians, Germans,
.o
Dutch and English. Monks from the Cistercian and Olivetani
orders transformed the rocky land at the tip of Puglia above
Capo di Leuca into vast olive plantations. A con stant trafc of
foreign ships lled every harbour in the region. In the coastal
Puglia town of Gallipoli, diplomatic legations from all over Eu-
rope set up ofces, and many consulates remained there right
up to +,.,. The peak of olive oil production in Puglia and Cal-
abria corresponded to the high point of the wool industry in
Florence in the fourteenth century; it then peaked again in the
seventeenth century with sales to England and Flanders.
The big chill of +-o, was one of the worst in historical
record. The entire south of Europe Greece, the Balkans, Italy,
most of France and even Spain was hit by the freeze and most
of the olive trees died or were abandoned. Tus cany alone in-
creased its olive groves, but the region only managed to match
the quantity produced before the chill after the mid-eighteenth
century. It was in this period that Tuscany started specializing
in producing high-quality oil for cooking, while southern Italy
took the opposite path, choosing to emphasize quantity and
mostly producing lamp oil. Italian oil, both com es tible and for
lighting, now found markets all across Europe as far as Russia.
As the eighteenth century came to a close, much of Italy
was covered with olive groves. Other olive oils, whether they
came from Provence, Greece, Spain or North Africa, offered
only weak competition to the Italian products. The crunch
would only come with the appearance of new oils and greases
for use in manufacturing during the century of the Indus-
trial Revolution.
In the second half of the nineteenth century olive oil
production stopped expanding. The climate proved unstable
and there were repeated freezes, culminating in a catastrophic
one in +,.,. By the beginning of the twentieth century pro-
duction had begun to contract. The period was one of heavy
.-
emigration, with a corresponding sharp decline in the labour
force, particularly in the south. Fields and orchards were
abandoned as farmers went abroad to seek their fortunes and
the olive trees were left to look after themselves. Meanwhile
those Italians who went abroad to the United States, Australia
and New Zealand introduced the cultivation of the olive tree
and began to spread the habit of cooking and dressing foods
with olive oil. It was the beginning of a new story a love
story between the olive and the New World.
.s
.,
I bring no overture of war, no taxation of homage; I hold the
olive in my hand: my words are as full of peace as matter.
William Shakespeare, Twelfth Night, Act + Scene
And here there grows, unpruned, untamed,
Terror to foemens spear,
A tree in Asian soil unnamed,
By Pelops Dorian isle unclaimed,
Self-nurtured year by year;
Tis the grey-leaved olive that feeds our boys;
Nor youth nor withering age destroys
The plant that the Olive Planter tends
And the Grey-eyed Goddess herself defends.
Sophocles, Oedipus at Colonus
Why do the olive tree and its products have such immense
symbolic value in all the civilizations that have ourished
around the Mediterranean? The signicance of the olive goes
far beyond its basic uses in lighting, cosmetics and food
preparation. Together with wheat and wine, the olive tree
makes up a trinity that marks a cultural identity, a cultural
universe, that is not always consistent with geographical
2
Ointments, Anointments and
Holy Oil: The Olive in Ritual
boundaries. It marks a long and nearly uninterrupted line
linking various different civilizations across several millennia
of history. Not surprisingly the great French historian Fer-
nand Braudel considered the olive tree as the distinguishing
feature of the Mediterranean itself.
+
,o
An olive tree can live for up to ,,ooo years. In Sardinia and Puglia there are
still large plantations of ancient olive trees.
,+
It cant be incidental to the olives symbolic power that it
takes a long time to grow an olive tree, and that an olive is
almost eternal. As the Italian proverb puts it: Vigna piantata da
me; moro da mio padre. Olivo da mio nonno. I planted the vine;
the mulberry, my father. But my grandfather planted the olive
tree. The olive is also easy to grow and not very demanding;
it likes dry weather and poor soil. Its a tough plant, and it
has an extraordinary ability to come back to life, as Sophocles
reminds us: when you cut or burn an olive tree, you can be
sure it will soon send out new shoots. From the earliest civi -
ization, the olive tree and olive oil have, for this and other
reasons, enjoyed a magical status in lands along the shores of
the Mediterranean.
Synonymous with fertility and rebirth, with endurance
and resistance to war and the passage of time, a symbol of
peace and wealth, the olive was considered a natural fount of
strength and purity in various myths and religions, serving
medical, sacred and magical needs. Olive oil was charged with
so much power that each step of the process of making it
An olive branch, a symbol of peace and harmony.
,.
had a ritual signicance. In ancient Egypt the harvest had to
be carried out according to specic rules governing the puri-
ty of the workers, while only those who anointed their hair,
face and feet with oil were worthy to approach the idols. In
Greece it was commonly believed that only virgins and chaste
men were eligible to cultivate olives, and impure workers were
forbidden to take part in the harvest. According to the six-
teenth-century Florentine humanist Pier Vettori, Greek men
could only harvest the olives if they hadnt made love with a
woman the night before.
As might be expected, given that Palestine was very likely
one of the places where olive trees were rst domesticated,
olive oil is hugely important in the pages of the Bible. As a
sign of blessing or consecration, a sign of recognition from
God to his people, and of their chosen status among other
human races, olive oil is a central element in Jewish and Chris -
tian culture. Noah, after sending out a crow to determine
Detail of the white dove returning to Noah from The Flood, a +.th-century
mosaic from the Cathedral of Monreale near Palermo, Italy.
,,
whether the Flood was over and waiting fruitlessly for it to
return, sends out a dove which returns to him carrying an
olive branch in its beak. The dove and olive branch announce
that God has forgiven his people and symbolizes the rm
alliance between both of them (Genesis s:++).
Moreover, olives and olive oil signify the fertility and
vitality of the promised land, rich in honey and olive trees
(Deuter onomy s:s), or sometimes they represent gifts that God
gives to his people in reward for their obedience and loyalty.
Those who obey his laws will produce oil, wine and wheat in
abundance, as a sign of wellbeing and happiness; while for
those who dont obey, the prophet Joel announces that the
eld is wasted, the land mourneth; for the corn is wasted: the
new wine is dried up, the oil languisheth (Joel +:+o).
But oil is not merely a symbol of peace and prosperity, it
is also, and above all, a mark of holiness. From Tutankhamun
Glass alabastron
used for holding
oils, thth
century rcr,
Phoenicia.
to King David, from Ulysses to Patroclus, kings, princes, dig-
nitaries, aristocrats, heroes, athletes and priests in both West
and East have used perfumed oil to mark their holiness,
their high social standing or their access to the gods. In many
religions and in various eras olive oil was the purest, most
,
Duccio di Buoninsegna, The Entry of Christ into Jerusalem, +,os++, detail
from the Maest in Siena.
,
precious and most eloquent way to exhibit close relations
with the divine, to express majesty, permanence and health.
Speaking to Moses, God ordered an ointment, perfumed
and rich in spices, composed according to the craft of the
perfume maker (Exodus .o). And this was the rst in a long
series of biblical balms. When Saul is consecrated king,
Sam uel took a vial of oil, and poured it upon his head, and
kissed him, and said, Is it not because the Lord hath anointed
thee to be captain over his inheritance? (i Samuel +o:+)
A generation later, David, from the dynasty of Judah,
would be anointed king by Samuel and so on up to Christ, the
anointed one. From the Hebrew mashiach, meaning anointed,
comes the word Messiah; in Greek the word is Christs, which
generates Christ, who in one person combines the three roles
of king, priest and prophet.
The entire life of Christ is punctuated by olives and holy
oil, as a sign of his holy nature. When he makes his fateful
en trance into Jerusalem, Christ is acclaimed by crowds wav-
ing olive branches as well as palms. Today, in many Catholic
countries, olive branches are distributed in church on Palm
Sunday and later brought back home as a sign of peace. In
central Italy olive branches were thought to have powers to
ward off evil spirits: a branch that had been blessed and was
kept in the house, behind the door or above the bed, meant
protection against any type of curse or spell. Crosses made of
cane or olives branches and a candle were planted on Holy
Cross Day to protect wheat elds against res and thunder-
storms; church bells would ring ad acquaiura (rapid, repeated
tolling) to keep hail away from the elds, while branches of
olive trees were burned so that the smoke would appease
the storms.
Its fruit being so precious, olive oil has not only long rep -
re sented this unequivocally sacred and theological dimension,
,o
but also has other mysterious meanings that freely marry
religion and superstition, medical and cosmetic purposes, as
if the olive were a sort of an intermediary between this life
and the next, between men and the gods. Before the arrival
of Christ, anointment in the Middle East was a sign of pres-
tige and a health measure to prevent and to cure illnesses. In
Babylonia the doctor was called asu, meaning the oil expert.
A few drops of olive oil were poured into a basin full of water
and the mixture was used by Babylonian priests to read the
future. A similar practice continued into the twentieth century:
in southern Italy, until quite recently, women would mix olive
oil and water to chase away the evil eye, thus Italians say: la
verit viene sempre a galla: the truth always rises to the surface.
Olive oil turns up in another practice used until recently in
central Italy, where women would anoint their breasts with
sacred oil from the lamps, or dip their nipples in a jar of oil
when breast milk failed to ow.
.
Cross fashioned from cane with olive branches.
In the Middle Ages holy oil was also used as a cure for
the sick and for women possessed by the devil. One of the
most pop ular devotional practices was linked to the tomb of
St Nicholas of Myra, in Lycia in todays Turkey. According to
Jacobus de Voragines Legenda aurea (Golden Legend), a thirteenth-
century collection of hagiographies, when the Turks occupied
Myra they opened the tomb of St Nicholas and the bones of the
saint were found oating in oil. On the lid of the sarcophagus,
in fact, are several funnel-shaped holes through which various
liquids and perfumed essences were poured into the tomb.
This dense and perfumed oily liquid that issued from other
holes at the bottom of the tomb was bottled in tiny vials and
offered to the faithful as a sacred oil for miraculous healing.
Although olive oil does not seem to have played a great
part in ancient Greek cuisine, the olive tree had great sym-
bolic signicance there and olive oil was highly prized as a
cosmetic. Scented oil was made at least as far back as the third
millennium rcr. Lists of different kinds of balsamic oils from
the Mycenaean era have been found in Pylos on the Pelo pon -
nesus, while at Mycenae itself, archaeologists have un earthed
lists of scents fennel, sesame, cress, mint, sage, rose and
juniper that would have been mixed with oil to make dif-
ferent ointments. Small asks of precious perfumed oil came
to Greece from the Middle East in the eighth century. Homers
heroes draw power, strength and youthfulness from using
perfumed oils: Nausicaa kept her bath oil in a golden ask
while Achilles anointed Patrocluss body, putting honey and
oil on his tomb (Iliad, book ii). The pre-Socratic philoso-
pher Democritis of Abdera, when asked about the secret to
his unusual longevity, used to answer: honey inside; olive
oil outside.
Precious balms based on olive oil were used to anoint the
bodies of Egyptian Pharaohs, Etruscan aristocrats and Greek
,-
and Roman athletes preparing themselves for competition.
In classical Greece, as the English scholar John Boardman
has written,
it was regular practice for athletes or others who had in -
dulged in energetic work, even women, to rub olive oil
on their bodies and then scrape off the mixed oil, dirt
and sweat with a scraper called a strigil . . . a fine bronze
,s
Alabaster
unguent jar,
+so+os rcr,
Egypt.
implement so personal a piece of equipment that it formed
a regular part of the grave furniture of a mans tomb.
,
Rubbing the skin with oil served more than aesthetic
pur poses: in countries as dry as Greece, where the skin easily
shrivels and cracks, it was a necessity.
The Romans also made great use of oil for cosmetic pur -
poses as well as in the kitchen; according to Pliny there are
two liquids especially agreeable to the human body: wine in-
side, and oil outside. Innumerable bottles and ampoules in
glass, silver, gold, bronze, ivory, ceramic and wood, which went
by the names of lekythoi, alabastron or aryballos, were made to
contain the precious liquid. Most of them were small, elon-
gated vases with a tiny handle; elegant ladies would attach
them to their wrists like a bracelet and carry them to the bath
along with their personal soap. Both were kept in a ne silver
casket. In Republican times the Romans tended to condemn
these niceties as oriental luxuries, but under the Empire the
use of cosmetics exploded. The Roman agricultural expert
,,
Bronze strigil, thth century rcr, from Magna Graecia. Perfumed oil
was applied to the body and then a strigil would be used to scrape it off,
together with dirt and sweat.
Lucius Junius Moderatus Columella wrote that the best oil
used to make balsams and perfumes came from the pulp of
the most prized olive varieties, of which Licinia olives were
among the best, followed by those from Sergia and Colminia.
The olives had to be hand-picked before they were completely
ripe and crushed with a suspended grindstone so as not to
break the stone. The same was done for the gleucine oil, an
aromatic oil mixed with grape must and various spices, used
for everyday ointments and prescribed for those who suffered
nervous strain.

Olive oil did not only play a fundamental role in Chris-

tian life from birth to death: it was also used to consecrate
living and ritual spaces. It brought light to human beings and
was therefore considered a direct sign of Gods presence
among men. And it had to be oil pressed from olives, for this
burned with far less smoke than other fats. One of the most
ancient and detailed descriptions of an oil lamp is of the
golden oil lamp with seven branches always lit in the Second
Temple in Jerusalem (described in Exodus .:,+o). The
Temple Menorah is said to have been stolen by the Romans
during the siege of Jerusalem in -o cr and taken back to
Rome; it can be seen pictured on the reliefs of the Arch of
Titus at the Forum.
Votive lamps also existed in Egypt, although we do not
know which of the extant lamps were devoted to the sun-god
Ra lamps in which the oil made from the thousands of
olive trees planted by Ramses burned. Among the excavated
lamps is a lotus-shaped oil burner in fine alabaster with
three arms (possibly an ancestor of the Menorah), found by
British archaeologist Howard Carter when he opened Tutan -
khamuns tomb in +,.., and today kept in the Cairo Museum.
The Islamic tradition also emphasizes the role of olive oil
as a source of light, and considers it basic to that culture. From
o
it, we have inherited the tale of a fabulous oil lamp that, when
rubbed, delivers magical results and is able to compensate for
Aladdins miserable life by transforming him into a prince.
The Prophet himself recommended that oil be used not
only in cooking but also for body care and to cure over oo ill-
nesses. Using olive oil was supposed to ward off evil for o
days. According to scholars of an Islamic holy book, the
Sunna, after the Great Flood the olive was the rst tree to grow
on the emerging land, and so Mohammed called it the blessed
tree. To dream of pressing olives and oil was supposed to bring
good luck and wealth.

One of the most famous verses of the

Koran speaks of oil as a symbol of knowledge and light:
Allah is the light of the heavens and the earth; a likeness
of His light is as a niche in which is a lamp, the lamp is in
a glass, (and) the glass is as it were a brightly shining star,
lit from a blessed olive-tree, neither eastern nor western,
the oil whereof almost gives light though fire touch it not
light upon light Allah guides to His light whom He
pleases, and Allah sets forth parables for men, and Allah
is Cognizant of all things. (Sura .)
The medieval Iranian mystic Al-Ghazali (+os++++), writ -
ing of olive oil, the pomegranate, the apple and the quince,
said that oil signies the reasoning intellect because it brings
light. Reason or rather the lack of it also gures in the
parable of the Wise and Foolish Virgins in the gospel of
Matthew. Ten virgins have been asked to attend a wedding.
While waiting for the bridegroom, they all fall fast asleep,
but the oil in their lamps continues to burn. When the bride-
groom nally arrives the ve Foolish Virgins have run out of
oil and have to run to the dealers to try to nd some. The
bridegroom arrives when they are gone, and the Wise Virgins,
+
who had brought along extra asks of oil for this eventu ality,
are able to follow him. But the Foolish Virgins are left behind
and miss the wedding feast.
The olive became profoundly rooted in Christian doctrine
and Catholic religious iconography in the sixteenth century
when Mary was linked with the oliva speciosa, a plant in the
walled garden, the hortus conclusus (which itself symbolized
Marys virginity and protection from sin), along with other
plants symbolizing mercy, strength and purity. For reasons
that were exquisitely political, the olive began to appear in
Renaissance paintings of the Annunciation, as the art histor -
ian Cristina Acidini Luchinat has observed.
o
Produced in the
fteenth and sixteenth centuries, these Sienese school paint-
ings depict the Angel Gabriel with a leafy olive branch in
hand, symbolizing Siena, rather than the lily that represented
the citys great rival, Florence. So peace supplanted purity.
In the patristic and medieval tradition Mary was often
worshipped as Notre Dame des Oliviers, Our Lady of the
Olives. The Oliva speciosa (fair olive tree, sometimes also oliva
fecunda, or fruitful olive, or oliva pinguissima, fat, rich olive, or
oliva mitis, meek and mild olive) is widespread in sanctuaries
of this title in France, Italy and Spain, signifying true and
loving dedication to the Lord, but also symbolizing Marys
strength, power to intercede and mercy. A wooden statue of
Notre Dame des Oliviers survived the re caused by light-
ning that destroyed the Church of Murat in Cantal, France in
+,,. Ever since, the medal of Notre Dame des Oliviers has
been said to safeguard those who wear it against lightning,
and to protect women who are about to become mothers.
The title Our Lady of the Olives may refer to the wood in
which the statue was carved, or perhaps alludes to Jesus
suffering at the Mount of Olives, a suffering, according to
another interpretation, that is visible in the sombre hue of
.
Giampaolo Tomassetti, copy by Nicola Barbino (+s,.+s,+),
Madonna dellolivo (Madonna of the Olives), oil on canvas.
the face and body of the statue. The colours of the Virgin,
which elsewhere are white and blue, are green at Murat, where
the Virgins mantle reects the colour of olives. Her feast day
is celebrated on the rst Sunday in September.
At Christmas and during the olive harvest ritual dishes
were served in Provence and Southern Sicily, propitiatory
offerings in hopes of a good harvest. Food historian Mague -
lonne Toussaint-Samat writes that until a few decades ago,
at the olive harvest of St Andrews Day in Provence the trees
were beaten with long sticks, traditional songs were sung, and
the day ended with a celebration of the olive: an enormous
dish of aioli, with day labourers, masters and neigh bours all
seated together under the trees. When the feast was over, peo-
ple danced the Ouliveto and the Farandole, and sang around
the oil presses.
-
Similarly, a dish called bagna cauda, bread and
vegetables dipped in hot, seasoned oil, is considered a sort of
feast in the area between Provence, Liguria and Piedmont.
In Umbria, at the end of the olive harvest, the workers
used to make a kind of bough called la frasca of laurel, olive
and r branches. It was xed to the top of a pole, from which
various gifts hung. This tree of abundance would then be
taken to the houses of the head workers, and they in ex change
would offer a meal to everyone.
The ritual use of olive oil during fast days or for propi -
ti atory rites during the olive harvest is rare today. In Egypt
Copts still abstain from every kind of animal food (meat,
eggs, milk, butter and cheese) during Lent, and they use
olive oil for one of their main Lenten dishes, made of vege -
tables and dukkah, a mixture of minced spices that they eat
with bread.
s
In short, the symbolic meanings of the olive and olive oil
are many and widespread. Where the Romans arrived, and
later where the Church took hold, the olive tree was planted

and became essential. The path from the altar and church
lamps soon enough reached the table, and oil was used for
domestic as well as ritual purposes and it was one of the
most precious items in any household by far. In the words of
a popular Sicilian proverb: Disgrace if you spill oil on the
table; grace, if you spill wine. The two liquids represent two
contrary aspects of life: oil represents measure and balance;
wine, excess and lack of moderation. According to Greek
myth ology, Apollo was born under an olive tree in Delos;
thus oil is an Apollonian substance, while wine is Dionysian.
Seen from this perspective, the vine and the olive rep re sent
two different styles of life: to consume the midnight oil is
considered a mark of diligence and application, while a night
spent consuming wine suggests sociability and in tem perance.
Olive oil was far too precious to be wasted or thrown
away. Its many uses in lighting, medicine, cosmetics and

Olive harvest, southern Italy.

for cooking meant olive oil played an important role in both
public and private life until the industrial revolution intro-
duced other kinds of oil and at least until gas came to illu mi -
nate our houses. But the powerful symbolic and mytho logical
halo sur rounding the olive continues to glow right up to
the present right up to the concept of the Medi terranean
Diet, which, with its liberal reliance on olive oil, exhibits all
the intensity and magic the olive had in antiquity and medi -
eval times.
o
-
The riper the berry the more greasy and less pleasant the
flavour of the oil. The best time for gathering olives, striking
a balance between quality and quantity, is when the berries
begin to turn dark.
Pliny the Elder, Natural History
Olive oil and sesame oil are among the most ancient oils in
the Western world and, as we have seen, olive oil was initially
used as an unguent, not for food or fuel. Other fats were used
for cooking, and animal fat was often used in place of oil. For
example, the Roman writer Marcus Portius Cato suggested
using lard to make sweet wine cakes and for the doughnut-
like globi encytum.
+
These were fried in lard and then spread
with honey. Even today in Sicily, there are some rather puri-
tanical traditionalists who insist that classical sweets, like
cannoli, should be fried in lard, not in olive or any other kind
of oil, and several other sweets are made with lard instead of
butter or olive oil. Elsewhere, where the olive did not grow,
other oil seeds were raised. In Egypt, prior to the introduc-
tion of the olive, oil was extracted from radish seeds. Pliny
wrote that even in his day, people grew radishes in preference
to corn because of their high oil yield and the resulting greater
3
Harvesting, Pressing
and Curing
s
prot. Other oil plants were moringa, known since ancient
times in Egypt, and the castor oil plant, mostly used for med-
icine. The oil commonly used in Mesopotamia was made
from sesame seeds or almonds.
.
At rst, just a few drops of olive oil squeezed from the
tiny black berries of the oleaster were sufcient to prepare per-
fumes, balms and ointments for use in ceremonies. These
precious balsams were obtained in a very rudimentary way,
by squeezing the olives by hand or underfoot (just as grapes
used to be trod upon to make wine) and carefully storing the
drops in tiny ceramic jars.
Crushing by hand was a precursor to using a mortar and
pestle. Crushing came rst, then pressing. Even in the twenti-
eth century, Antonio Carpuso writes, peasants in Morocco
and in southern Italy were still crushing the olives in a stone
mortar with a big wooden pestle, reducing them to a thick
paste and then stufng the paste into a fabric sleeve.
,
Then,
grasping the two ends, they would twist the sleeve so that the
oil would sweat out and drip into a vase. To extract all the
oil left in the sleeve, hot water was poured over it and it was
squeezed again twice or three times. When the process was
Olive press,
red granite,
Luxor, middle
of the -th
century rcr.
,
nished, the oil would oat on the water in the vase and
could be drained off the top.
The earliest known evidence of the crushing and pressing
process has been unearthed in Palestine, and is to be seen at
the Museum of the Olive in Haifa. This ensemble of a mortar
and a pestle, dating back to some time around the fth mil -
lennium rcr, was possibly the rst type of instrument used
to crush ripe olives. The olives were rst reduced to paste in
the mortar; then the paste was enclosed in a crown of olive
branches to keep it together, and pressed on large at stones,
piled one on top of the other, to squeeze out the oil. On Crete,
Putting crushed olives into
basket containers for pressing.
Crushing olives with a
fragment of ancient column,
Beit Jibrin, Palestine,
early .oth century.
o
where we know that the olive oil industry was of primary im-
portance from around .oo rcr, we nd more sophisticated
technology such as a levered press, in which a beam weighted
with heavy stones bore down upon bre discs containing the
olive paste. To extract the oil left in the paste, the olives were
drenched with hot water and then pressed again. The resulting
liquid was poured into vats and the oil allowed to rise to the
top, after which the water was drawn off through a spout at
the bottom.
A rudimentary example of the levered press certainly
a revolutionary technology for its time was excavated at
Haifa, where the olives were crushed with huge circular
stones; after this the olive paste was stuffed into sacks made
Olive press, Tel
Mique-Ekron. The
olives were crushed
in the central cavity
by round stones; side
craters held stacks of
fibre discs, through
which paste was
pushed by the
pressure exercised by
the weighted beams.
Olive press, Haifa.
The weighted beam
pressed on discs
full of olive paste.
Grooves in the stone
sent the oil into
purpose-built
receptacles.
+
of plant bres, which were piled one upon another. The oil
was squeezed out using a beam attached to the wall, on which
weights were hung to exert pressure.
A further renement in the process was discovered a
few decades ago not far from Tel Aviv in the enormous olive
processing plant containing nearly +oo presses excavated
in Tel Mique-Ekron. Here the press was composed of three
carved stones: a central one to press and crush the olives, and
two lateral ones with a deeper hole in the middle on which
to pile, one on top of the other, the large at discs lled with
olive paste. Later on, the crushing was done by a large mill-
stone turning in an open tub, into which the olives were
tipped whole, and came out as a paste.
The Romans were probably the rst to make widespread
use of olive oil in cooking and to eat olives in large quantities.
They experimented with olive oil to season their polenta,
legume soups and bread and they wouldnt cook without it!
All aspects of olive cultivation, from curing the olives through
oil production, were much improved by the Romans who, as
we have seen in chapter One, planted olive trees everywhere
they went in their conquest. As far back as Republican Rome,
writers such as Cato, in what is today considered a wonderful
summa of Roman agricultural expertise, the De agri cultura (On
Farming), promoted olive plantations because they were less
expensive to maintain than vineyards and needed fewer
workers to supervise them. This principle, frequently enunci -
ated in Roman agricultural treatises, was deeply rooted in the
minds of Roman gentleman farmers from Republican times
right up through the Empire and its eventual collapse. This
certainly explains why the Romans made great technical
advances in oil production, inventing techniques that were
used until modern times. The grindstone called mole olearia was
the most basic; it was made of a round base xed on the
.
oor with a cylindrical grindstone that turned around an axle,
crushing and squeezing the olives.
Depending on how wealthy the owner of the press was,
writes Maguelonne Toussaint-Samat, the press was worked
by slaves, by a mule or donkey or even by the wife of the
owner!

The next step was the invention of the trapetum, a large

carved stone with a central pivot around which two stone
hemispheres rotated. Once the olives were crushed, the oil
was extracted by a press, either a screw press or a simple
wooden beam on which weights were hung.
The trapetum crushed the olives against the sides of the
mortar, rather than against the base. It was expensive and hard
to build, because it was necessary to calculate the exact dis-
tance between the millstone and the mortar, so it was used
only on large estates, while in small villages they continued to
use the grindstone on a stone mortar with a truncated conic
shape, an easier and cheaper method.
The instructions given by all the Roman agrarian experts
about when to pick the olives and how to extract the oil were
so detailed that we can easily follow them today. All agreed
Crushing olives, Palestine, +,o,.
,
that the harvest must be done with great care, and that the
olives had to be picked by hand without using sticks to knock
them off the branches, ideally before the olives fell to the
ground. The best moment for the harvest was early Novem -
ber, when a few olives had just started to turn brown but
most were still nice and green. The Romans called the oil
extracted from these olives, which have just started changing
colour but are not yet ripe, Oleum viride, for its wonderful
greenish-gold colour. From the rst pressing of those olives
one obtained top-quality oil; the two subsequent pressings
give second quality, and then ordinary oil.
The ancient writers also made it clear that olive oil turned
bad very quickly, and it was recommended that a store of
olives be kept handy so that oil needed for the table could be
produced immediately before use. Be aware, Cato wrote, that
Amphora with
an olive-gathering
scene. A young
man shakes down
the olives. Two
bearded figures,
one on each side,
with purple drapery
round the loins, are
beating the trees
with long sticks;
the one on the
right wears a pilos.
At the foot of the
tree is a nude
youth kneeling to
the right, gathering
up the olives into
a basket as they
fall, .o rc.

as soon as you collect them, you have to process the oil

from the olives before they spoil . . . Think of the rains
which fall every year and make the berries drop to the
ground. If you collect them early and are prepared to
stock them you wont have any damage and the oil will
turn out to be green, and the best. If you leave them on
the ground too long or on a table, the olives will start to
go rancid and the olive oil will stink . . .

Pliny the Elder set down a scale of oil quality which is

still valid. He explained that the same olive could produce
different types of oil. When the olive was still green and
unripe, you obtained the best, most exquisite oil, called Oleum
ex albis ulivis, very similar to the Oleum viride mentioned above.
The riper the olive, the denser the oil and the less agreeable
it tasted. But even then there were important differences in
oil quality depending on whether maturation took place in
the crusher or on the tree, and whether the tree had been
irrigated or not. The other oils were cheaper types, such as
Oleum maturum from black ripe olives, which was decidedly
less good quality compared to the others; Oleum caducum,
made from olives that had fallen on the ground and were
very ripe; and Oleum cibarium, the worst of all, made of rancid
olives and consumed by slaves or used for other purposes,
such as lighting.
o
In medieval Italy local authorities would establish the date
of the olive harvest, but most often it began on St Martins
Day, ++ November, and was usually completed before Christ-
mas. Afterwards, the men made their last pass, picking up
the remaining olives on the ground or those left on the trees.
In southern Italy, in Latium and in Liguria, the olives were
knocked off the trees with sticks and the berries collected
on large cotton sheets spread on the ground. Even today in
Olives are
collected in
nets on the
ground.
Olive harvest, Sicily.
o
Tuscany you can nd farmers collecting the olives the way
Marcus Terentius Varro advised: picking them by hand, right
up to the top of the tree, without using sticks as the slaves
used to do because they damaged the berry and broke the ne
branches, exposing the tree to frost damage the following
winter. In Tuscany, those hand-picked olives are placed in
little baskets hanging from the farmers arm.
-
As Pliny tells it,
some time always passed between the harvest and the crush-
ing of the olives, and during this time the olives could rest on
wooden tables so long as they were undamaged. But if they
had been damaged by insects or were even just bruised, they
would soon go rancid and produce a bad oil. Today olives are
held for no more than s hours after the harvest.
Although the process of making olive oil is very ancient,
the notion of eating this bitter berry and the means to cure it
seem to have come later and with greater difculty. The Bible
cites oil and its sacred uses far more often than it mentions
olives. And olives rarely appear in classical or medieval recipe
books. This doesnt necessarily mean that people didnt eat
them, however. It is probable that olives were too humble
for aristocratic tables (the only source of written recipes up
until modern times) and they were most likely too obvious
and too poor a food to mention in writing. But dried, brined
or salted, they were probably a common food for peasants
and workers. Their high fat content (and caloric value) and
their omnipresence suggests they would certainly have been
eaten all around the Mediterranean. Nourishing and easy to
carry, to prepare and to store, olives more than any other
fruit, once people learned how to cure them became a pillar
of the rustic diet in Spain, Italy and Greece, as they still are
today. What could be more delicious than a bowl of green
or black olives, a loaf of bread, some cheese and a good
bottle of wine?
Cured olives were left in the Pharaohs tomb to provide
food for the afterlife, despite the fact that the Egyptians
didnt make much use of olives or olive oil in their diet. The
Phoenicians may have known that olives that had spontane -
ously fallen from the tree and lain on the ground were good
to eat; when olives matured that way they lost much of their
bitterness. Homer referred in several places to the olive berry:
pickled, brined and highly seasoned. We know that the Etrus -
cans traded oil extensively, probably mostly for cosmetic use.
But in an Etruscan tomb in Cerveteri, archaeologists found
olive stones which had been left as an offering for the dead,
while olives preserved in brine were discovered inside Etruscan
amphorae found on a sunken ship near the island of Giglio,
and dated to around the sixth century rcr.
Archestratus, a comic poet and classical Greek food ex -
pert, mentions ripe black olives in his recipes only once. But
he always used olive oil to cook, and he urged a very simple
cuisine seasoned with salt and oil, in preference to the elab -
orate style of cooking that was popular in Greek Sicily, which
he considered far too rich.
s
While most olives are cultivated to produce oil, some
varieties are selected to be cured in lye, brine or dry salt.
Cato mentions olives and bread as being staples in the
diet of the peasants and labourers.
,
His workers rations
con sisted of bread, wine, salt and olives. Rather miserly, he
recommended they be given the windfall olives and mature
fruit with a high oil yield, even though they were often rotten.
The olives were to be distributed sparingly and, when used up,
should be replaced by pickled sh and vinegar. Each man was
allowed a pint of the oil each month. But nothing was wasted,
and so a sort of oil cake, made from olive paste left over from
the last pressing, called sampsa, was given to the poorest, or
sold as a snack in the markets, avoured with salt, cumin,
-
s
anise, fennel and olive oil. Meanwhile the best-preserved
olives appeared mostly on the tables of the wealthier classes.
Right up until the +,-os workers on large estates in Sicily
had the right to receive one litre of olive oil per month; their
daily diet (at noon) consisted of a one-kilogram loaf of bread,
one litre of wine, +oo grams of cheese (usually ricotta) and a
handful of olives. In the evening, they got .o grams of pasta
cooked with wild greens. This was considered a desirable
ration, since most farm labourers didnt have pasta or bread
as often as they wanted.
The Romans cured olives in many different ways and at
different stages of ripeness. Just as the Roman guidelines for
making oil are the rst we know of, so they also set down the
rst rules on record for curing olives, rules still followed
today. Green olives were to be preserved in salt brine, or they
were rst crushed and then repeatedly washed in water, and
Olive focaccia, a traditional Italian bread that uses olive oil and the olives
themselves. For recipe, see p. +o+.
Olives in brine with wild fennel.
oo
nally seasoned in brine avoured with vinegar, fennel and
other spices. Sometimes they were pressed and kept in jars
with layers of fennel and mastic at the top and bottom, lled
with brine, must, vinegar, even occasionally honey. The half-
ripe berries were cured in olive oil, while the ripe ones were
and still are sprinkled with salt, left for ve days and then
dried in the sun. Pitted ripe black olives were cured in jars
with oil, coriander, cumin, fennel, rue and mint; this was
known as oil salad and was eaten with cheese. Cato mentions
a special dish known as epityrum which was considered to have
been a Sicilian invention: it consisted of stoned green, black
and mottled olives chopped and mixed with oil, vinegar,
coriander, cumin, fennel, rue and mint, placed in an earthen-
ware dish and covered with oil to serve.
As continues to be the case today, olives were not con-
sidered a proper meal in antiquity, but were eaten as a side
dish or hors doeuvre with bread, cheese and onions. This
was true in ancient Greece and at the Roman banquet, which
usually started with a gustatio o promulsis, like the modern
antipasto, made of ripe black olives, green olives in brine,
salad, lightly poached wild asparagus and wine.
+o
Today olives
are offered as an antipasto on Italian tables in much the same
way. In Tunisia, one of the main African producers of olive
oil under the Roman Empire, in the Maghreb and north-west
Africa today, olives are an important ingredient in dishes like
tagine, a stew cooked in a special pot and described as smoth-
ered in olives.
++
Strangely enough, however, olive oil is not
used in Moroccan or North African cuisine, except in Tunisia,
while in Italy, Greece, Spain and Portugal it is universal.
After the Roman Empire declined, when northern in -
vaders brought a taste for lard, pork fat became a staple in
the everyday European diet. The techniques for producing
oil for culinary use and for curing olives were lost and most
Roasted olives with orange zest, an antipasto. For recipe, see p. ,+.
Green olive
salad, a Sicilian
antipasto. For
recipe, see p. ,o.
o.
of the oil produced was used to make soap or for industrial
purposes. The body of knowledge accumulated by the Ro-
mans was forgotten for at least eleven centuries. In +- Pier
Vettori, an erudite Tuscan, once again established the precepts
for making good oil, and it began to be produced in Provence
and Tuscany. But high-quality oil was now a luxury product
too expensive for everyday use by the peasantry.
Elsewhere in Italy, especially Sicily, the techniques for
prod ucing good oil were utterly unknown. Oil was pressed
from olives harvested on the ground, contrary to the ancient
Roman practice. It was stored in smelly goatskin bags, with
the inevitable consequences! It was believed that olives that
had been stored for a while gave the most oil, and so, after the
harvest, the olives were left to pile up and ferment in a corner
of the house, sprinkled with salt, while they awaited their turn
at the press. In Sicily, to determine whether the olives were
ready, the farmer plunged his arm into the putrefying mess; if
the arm came out white and oiled, they were ready to press,
but if the arm came out red, like the olive pulp, that meant
they were still raw. Foreign travellers rightly avoided using this
oil to dress their salads when they went south of Naples,
given the powerful and usually rancid avour it had.
+.
Under
the circumstances, it should come as no surprise that Martin
Luther, in his reforming zeal, preached against the olive oil
imposed by the Church during fasting: beyond any questions
of morality, there was also a problem of taste, for much of
the oil in circulation was of very poor quality.
In any case, sixteenth-century Europe was soon divided in
two parties: the butter-users and those who much preferred
olive oil. And the situation hasnt changed much since then.
It was not merely a question of religious belief, according
to French food historian Jean-Louis Flandrin,
+,
but also an
issue of taste: northerners simply disliked olive oil (and here,
it would be interesting to know what quality of oil was ex -
ported to those countries) and dreamed of an oil that would
be colourless and tasteless, bland and without any olive scent.
So the path to industrial olive oil production was opened.
At the time, obtaining both good butter and good olive
oil was a matter of price; both were very expensive, synony-
mous with luxury and high social rank. For the upper class,
the choice was not merely based on geography north or
o,
Pieter Claesz., Still-life, early +-th century, oil on canvas.
o
south it was also a question of palate. High social status or
particular local habits sometimes led people to break the
rules; thus aristocrats in France or England might use olive oil
while their countrymen were butter-eaters. Countess Mahaut,
a fteenth-century French aristocrat from Artois, regularly
used olive oil. In English recipe books of the same period,
the dishes made with olive oil are mostly those enjoyed by the
ranks of the aristocracy. And vice versa: a Neapolitan recipe
book of the fteenth century prescribes butter more often
than lard and just as often as olive oil, and the local ravioli
stuffed with local cheese are fried in butter! Thus the famous
opposition between fats butter versus olive oil is not just
a matter of north and south, but also a matter of social dis-
tinctions.
Something similar is going on in the gorgeous Dutch
still-lifes of the sixteenth century, where a lavish and boun-
tiful nature includes an abundance of exotic ingredients
often including a tray or a bowl lled with olives. In those
times and in that place far to the north, those olives certainly
represented peace and prosperity, just as they do in the Bible,
but they were also a marker of distinction, of wealth, of ex -
ceptional luxury. Those same olives that in Catos time were
doled out as food to the workers were now treasured in an
expensive Chinese bowl on the Flemish table!
o
The olives noblest function is, of course, to keep a lemon twist
out of your Martini
L. R. Shannon
My wife says Ambersons dont make lettuce salad the way
other people do; they dont chop it up with sugar and
vinegar at all. They pour olive oil on it with their vinegar
and they have it separate not along with the rest of the
meal. And they eat these olives, too: green things they are,
something like a hard plum, but a friend of mine told me
they tasted a good deal like bad hickory-nuts. My wife
says she is going to buy some; you got to eat nine and
then you get to like em, she says. Well, I wouldnt eat nine
bad hickory-nuts to get to like them, and Im going to let
these olives alone. Kind of a womans dish anyway, I
suspect but most everybody will be making a stagger to
worm through nine of em, now Ambersons brought
em to town. Yes, sir, the restll eat em, whether they get
sick or not!
In his +,+s novel The Magnicent Ambersons Booth Tarkington
casts a deliciously ironic glance at the culinary habits of the
4
The Olive Meets the New World
oo
new American bourgeoisie in the early years of the twentieth
century. In those days before the taste for French cuisine
and long before the Mediterranean diet was ever heard of
the New World palate was still largely virgin. Our narrator
seems to know nothing of the lands where olives are grown,
he nds the idea of eating them repellent, and he doesnt
really approve of his patrician neighbours, the magnicent
Ambersons, who are so outrageously cosmopolitan as to eat
their salad as a side dish, dressed not with sickly sweet sauces
but merely with olive oil and vinegar. You couldnt get much
further from the Flapper Salad popular in the +,.os, made
of lettuce, maraschino cherries, mayonnaise, pears, cheese
and articial colourings. Middle-class Americans didnt know
or care about the long history of the olive in the Mediter ra -
nean and the Middle East and few were yet aware that olives
were becoming the signature garnish for the Martini, one of
the most fashionable cocktails of the Roaring Twenties.
It would be a while yet before olives and olive oil became
familiar to Americans and part of their daily diet. Although
olive oil had for a long time been produced in California, it
never really found a ts market. The only potential consumers
were Italian-Americans, and they preferred to import their oil
from Italy. The only olives that caught on in America were
the little green ones in Martinis and the big, ripe black Cali -
fornia olives, so very unlike pungent Italian or Spanish
olives. With their gentle in other words, bland avour,
California olives caught on quickly in the United States and,
right up to the +,sos, were the only ones to be found in
many places.
And yet the olive tree was one of the very rst Old World
plants to be transplanted to the Americas. The rst olive trees
in the New World arrived in Hispaniola and Cuba as early as
+.o, sent from Olivares in the Aljarafe region near Seville.
o-
When the Spanish conquistadors reached Peru in +oo, they
also brought olive cuttings. But it was thanks to the patient
agricultural skills of Franciscan, Jesuit and Dominican mis-
sionaries that olives, along with many other European fruits,
were widely cultivated in South America, and then in Mexico,
nally reaching Alta California in the late +-oos. The olives
were planted by Franciscan friars who strayed north from San
Ancient olive tree cared for by Franciscan monks at the Garden of
Gerusalem, American colony, Jerusalem, +,oo+o.
os
Blas in Mexico and who later founded the San Diego de
Alcal Mission in what is today San Diego, in +-o,. The friars
planted the olive trees mainly for their own use: to provide
the oil they used for cooking and lighting, for making soaps,
to prepare wool for spinning and to lubricate machinery.
The missionaries maintained their olive groves until
Mexicos emancipation from the Spanish crown in +s.., when
the new Mexican government took possession of all Spanish
public lands in California. Eleven years later, in +s,,, Mexico
secularized the missions, seizing the land from the church and
attaching it to the colony of California. When the Francis cans
left the missions and abandoned their elds and orchards,
there was no one to tend them, and the olive groves lan-
guished. Nevertheless, a few trees survived at the San Jose
mission and in San Diego, while the oldest ones, dating back
to +so, were still alive at the Santa Clara mission in +,,o, as
recalled by Judith M. Taylor.
+
These scanty but tenacious shoots of Old World culture
and of the olives several thousand-year-old history were the
germ of a new direction for the olive. This new chapter in its
story takes place not in little orchards or family olive groves
but on a global scale, in vast, single-crop tracts of olive trees
on nearly every continent, using intensive agriculture and the
most sophisticated technology.
Between +so and +,oo olive growers in California had
begun to improve their product. Cultivars were imported from
Mediterranean countries and by the end of the century Cali-
fornia growers had mastered the art of making good olive oil.
Production increased notably. But for various reasons, olive
oil produced in America did not nd much of a dom estic
market. The great majority of the rapidly expanding ts pop-
ulation had never even tasted olives and had only a marginal
taste for olive oil. The same was true in Britain: during the
o,
eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the olive oil exported
from southern Italy to Great Britain was largely used to grease
factory machinery, while a small quantity was used, grudg-
ingly, as medicine. As the old English saying brown as olive
oil suggests, most people in Britain had never even seen
good olive oil, let alone tasted it. Up until the +,-os pharma-
cies were the only place in Britain where one could nd olive
oil. It was stocked as a laxative.
In the ts only the Hispanic population ate olives; they
alone knew how to cure them and how to cook with olive oil.
In California they most probably harvested olives from the
trees abandoned at the missions, while later, when Italian im-
migrants arrived en masse to the ts in the second half of the
nineteenth century, they bought and used olive oil liberally, but
not, as we have seen, the oil produced in California. Nearly so
per cent of the immigrants who settled in California came
from regions where olives had been cultivated for centuries:
Lucca in Tuscany, and Sicily. They understood the value of
Californias olive groves and possessed the skills to cultivate
and prune the trees.
Yet it was precisely the Italians of this mass immigration
who consistently bought imported Italian olive oil right up
until the +,+os. The early Italian-American community re-
mained astonishingly faithful to the original Italian product
and in general to those foods considered key elements of their
cultural identity. Between +s,s and +,+o the consumption of
imported olive oil increased three-fold. Italian-American
families were willing to do without heat and drastically reduce
their diets, but they did not sacrice their olive oil, pasta and
wine,
.
as Mario Puzo writes:
During the Great Depression of the +,,os, though we
were the poorest of the poor, I never remember not
-o
dining well. Many years later as a guest of a millionaires
club, I realized that our poor family on home relief ate
better than some of the richest people of America. My
mother would never dream of using anything but the
nest imported olive oil, the best Italian cheeses . . .
,
Olive oil consumption by Italians abroad continued to
grow up to +,.,. Oil had become one of the leading Italian
imports in the ts. Nevertheless, after the First World War the
pattern of exports changed radically. Oil was now produced
in the New World and a new class of consumers was born.
The Great Depression coincided with the meteoro lo gical
big chill of +,.,, a freeze that killed more than half the olive
trees in Italy. The countrys overall production of oil fell by o
per cent, and the ts market for Italian oil collapsed. At the
same time, the mass Italian immigration to the ts fell to a
trickle with the application of tough new immigration laws.
Suddenly, demand for high-quality Italian oil fell off sharply.
Italy could not provide it and Italian-Americans had stopped
consuming it. The war on the one hand and the growth of
Italian-American communities on the other (by now most such
Italians were born in America) created the conditions for
Italian-Americans to produce what they needed for their diet
in the New World. Second-generation Italian-Americans
tended to know less than their parents about quality olive oil.
And often they shared the American taste for the bland, mass-
produced avour of inexpensive cottonseed oil. Their shops
would no longer sell homemade cans of oil fresh in from
Sicily and smudged with dirt.

In Brooklyn, people now spoke broccolino, a mixture of

Sicilian, Neapolitan and New York English. They wanted to
buy tins of olive oil and other products that conjured up the
idealized memory they had of Italy and the country they
-+
dreamed of was a concentrated blend of sun, food and
beauty. It was that ideal they wanted to see on a label; they
were not so interested in where the food had been grown or
when it was harvested or packed. A can of oil, a package of
pasta: they were pretexts to dream and indulge in a power-
ful nostalgia. San Remo brand, Italian Product, packed in
Italy; Marca Sole Mio, impaccato in Italia per C. Torrielli,
Boston, Mass.; Orlando Brand, per la mensa siciliana, pure
virgin olive oil, packed in Italy: such were the brands Italians
bought.

High-quality olive oil became scarce and many un -

scrup ulous dealers sold greasy, insipid, adulterated oil as pure
extra-virgin olive oil. A new method of rening cottonseed
oil developed in the United States allowed olive oil to be cut
with cottonseed oil to get more prot out of it.
Olives grown and canned in America were another story.
When, at the beginning of the twentieth century, American
oil producers ceded the market to Italian imports, it was not
just a question of palate, but of prots. Olive oil produced
in the ts was far more expensive than that imported from
Italy,
o
largely because of higher labour costs. Italys sharecrop
labour force meant that even with the cost of transportation,
importers could undercut the domestic product. The indus-
try in the ts thus shifted to canning olives.
Huge plantations for the canning industry grew up in the
Central Valley. But in Sonoma and Napa, great trees dating
back to the states early history were dug out to plant vines or
sent south to decorate parking lots around Los Angeles. And
then late in the +,sos, when a growing number of Americans
began to realize what olive oil could do for them, Califor -
nians again noticed the trees that remained.
-
The queen of canned olives was a German-born Ameri -
can named Freda Ehmann, the woman who rst understood
how to package the fruits of the olive tree and how to sell
-.
the sharp, sour, bitter olive to Americans. With the help of
the dean of the Agriculture School at the University of Cali -
fornia at Berkeley, Ehmann learned how to cure olives so as
to reduce what might be called their ethnic taste, so they no
longer tasted piquant like Spanish olives but had a mild
avour that pleased a difdent American palate. Olives had
traditionally been packed in large casks in brine, but Ehmann
soon had the idea of packaging them in small quantities, so
they were easy to store and transport.
Born in Germany in +s,,, the daughter of a Lutheran
mini ster, her mother a descendent of Huguenot exiles, Freda
Ehmann had moved to the United States as a girl. At the age
of +s she had married a fellow German immigrant and med-
ical doctor, Ernst Cornelius Ehmann, and settled in Quincy,
Illinois, to be a wife and mother. When Dr Cornelius died
pre m aturely, she moved to California with her daughter,
Emma, to join her son, who had a business venture there. In
+s,- she lost the money she had invested in her sons business.
Harvesting olives in California in the early .oth century.
Freda Ehmann testing her cured black olives.
-
Penniless and middle-aged, Freda Ehmann was not a woman
to waste time in self-pity. She started pickling the olives from
the familys only asset, a .o-acre orchard, on her daughters back
porch in Oakland. Initially the olives were packed in barrels,
then in glass jars, and nally in tin cans. The Ehmann Olive
Company quickly became a success, and not only in gourmet
circles. By +,o Ehmann olives were the olive of choice in the
ts, selling to fancy hotels and famous restaurants nationwide.
s
Unfortunately Ehmanns personal success story did not
have a happy ending. In +,+, improperly processed olives
caused the deaths from botulism of , people in the East and
Midwest. Ehmanns largest canned olive factory went bust.
But she lived on until +,,., when at the age of ,, she still
lived by a rm set of rules: no alcohol in the house, and no
green olives.
,
Ehmann olives were of course the black California ripe
variety. Her lye-cure recipe produced a very mild-tasting olive,
similar to the black California olives still found in cans on
grocery shelves today. After the botulism episode consumers
were wary of canned olives for several years. But condence
in canning methods was restored, and when in the +,.os the
Martini with its green olive became the Jazz Era drink of
choice, and the black ripe olive became a staple of the relish
tray, olives were absolved. Americans still didnt consume
much olive oil, although they sometimes used it to season
their salads, but from now on they would consider it a cock-
tail hour must to have a can of olives in the house. Today, the
table olive canning industry absorbs almost ,o per cent of
California olive production, and California is responsible for
some o.- per cent of the worlds table olives.
In Italy the olive landscape has changed utterly since the
Second World War. The small farms and mezzadria, or share-
cropping labour force, have disappeared, and along with them
-
the mixed crops vines, olive trees, almonds, peaches, gs and
so on associated with smallholdings. Italy would con tinue to
be the world leader in olive oil production until +,s, when a
new freeze would destroy many prime olive groves in central
Italy. New orchards planted after the +,s freeze mean that
the time-honoured Italian countryside now looks different.
Beginning in +,so, Europe as a whole, not Italy, became the
primary exporter, as Spain, Portugal and Greece stepped in
to ll the gap. Italy, which up until the mid-+,sos was respon-
sible for , per cent of world production, now produces just
+ per cent, after Spain, the worlds largest producer.
Even more importantly, today more than ,ooo years
into the history of that spiny little bush that became the olive
tree this tasty, oily fruit is no longer an exclusively a Medi -
terranean affair. The olive and its oil have long sailed past the
straits of Gibraltar and reached the Americas, Australia and
New Zealand. The sixth millennium has begun.
John Singer Sargent, The Olive Grove, +,+o, oil on canvas.
-o
Waiter, Extra Olive Oil Please, I Have a Headache
Robert Lee Hotz, Los Angeles Times, + September .oo
This virgin and extra virgin is to confuse. A woman
is a virgin or she is not. How can she be extra virgin?
What matters is taste.
Mort Rosenblum, Olives: The Life and Lore of a Noble Fruit
In conclusion, allow me to touch on the theme of the Medi -
te rranean Diet, and the near-universal belief today that
healthy eating is linked to a generous use of olive oil in the
kitchen never mind centuries of Escofer, Julia Child or
the rigid dietary rules of early twentieth-century America,
when nutritionists believed that immigrant food, including
of course pasta and olive oil, led to the consumption of
alcohol, caused overexcitement of the nervous system, and
was indigestible.
+
Behind this new passion stands a paradox: there is in fact
no particular, precise place where this Mediterranean Diet
resides. Reams of scientific and gastronomic litera ture
havent proved there is any such thing as a Mediterranean
cultural identity but meanwhile scientists, chefs, nutritionists,
5
Good Fat and Bad Fat:
The Mediterranean Diet
--
food manufacturers and government health advisers have all
determined that olive oil is the staple of a correct diet, the
so-called Mediterranean Diet. In fact, according to many
schol ars, it is nearly impossible to nd a common link among
the various countries that surround the Mediterranean Sea,
least of all on culinary grounds. A few point to a shared sense
of honour and chastity among women living on the Medi ter -
ranean coast, others to some shared social, political or ecolog-
ical conditions,
.
but the Italian historian Piero Cam po resi
warned, only half in jest, against this sort of culinary Mediter-
ranean infatuation. According to Camporesi, probably the
only thing that could be said to link together the countries that
are considered part of the Mediterranean ensemble might be
a stew: a thick stew made of meat and vegetables, like what
the French call pot au feu, the Spanish olla potrida, and the
Piedmontese casseula perhaps cooked in olive oil. Yet this is
a common ingredient for only a few of the so-called Mediter-
ranean countries since most of the Islamic countries prefer
to cook with some sort of animal fat, do not drink wine and
prefer rice to pasta!
,
The Mediterranean region.
-s
Paradoxically, too, it is difcult to imagine preferring the
poor dietary model of the Mediterranean Diet except in pros -
perous societies where economic well-being has long been
taken for granted. Not by chance, in the regions from which
the model of the Mediterranean Diet were drawn Greece,
southern Italy and Spain that very diet is least popular today.
Meat, animal fat and fast food are now symbols of abundance
and well-being that were unthinkable for these populations as
recently as thirty years ago.
Nevertheless, the Mediterranean Diet and the liberal use
of extra virgin olive oil has become an article of faith today for
The Mediterranean Diet pyramid.
-,
Detail of Neptune and the Four Seasons, mid-.nd century, mosaic.
many restaurants and dietary experts. Perhaps for the rst time
since antiquity, an alliance in the name of olive oil has been
made between food producers and experts. How did this come
about? Might there be more than just health reasons behind
this new alliance?
It was just after the Second World War that experts began
to study diets alternative to that popular in the United States.
The war had brought a forcible change in habits and it was time
for new ideas. Several research organizations began to com-
pare different Western diets: in +,- the Rockefeller Foun -
dation conducted an epidemiological survey of -o fam ilies
in Crete to determine the consequences of food habits. Dr
Ancel Keys carried out medical research in Nicotera (Calabria),
Heraklion and Castelli. From those studies came evidence that
a diet based on wheat (bread and pasta), unsaturated fat, such
as olive oil, as opposed to animal fat, and fresh vegetables and
fruits, helped to prevent coronary heart disease. In +,, Ancel
and Margaret Keys wrote the recipe book Eat Well and Stay
Well, in which they condensed different cuisines from many of
the countries belonging to the Mediterranean area, and gave
a practical structure to this model that was both dietary and
culinary. In many ways this was a great revolution, consider-
ing that French cuisine had reigned without any competition
since the eighteenth century. Eat Well and Stay Well had a big
impact in the ts and, from there, echoed back to Europe,
where the book was translated into Italian in +,o..
Over the next o years, the Keyss research would have
a profound impact not only in the medical sphere but also in
the culinary arena, and would encourage Americans to want
to eat a healthier, more balanced diet based on a single type
of vegetable fat: olive oil.
Other studies, such as Keyss Seven Countries: A Multivariate
Analysis of Death and Coronary Heart Disease (+,so), reinforced
the concept of good eating and the so-called Mediterranean
Diet. When the population of Greece was found to have a
lower rate of heart disease than the rest of world, the data on
diet in the +,s Rockefeller Foundation report was taken as
an explanation, and the presence of good fat, olive oil, in
the Greek diet was portrayed as the key element of what
became known as the Mediterranean Diet.

In the +,-os and sos an unusual alliance between science

and gastronomy supported the view that an olive oil-based
cuisine would bring great health benets to the individual, and
many publications trumpeted the Mediterranean diet. Giorgio
De Luca was part of that generation of Italian-Ameri cans who
as children in the +,os were ashamed to go to school with a
so
Caponata, Sicilian aubergine salad. For recipe, see pp. ,+..
sandwich lled with the Sicilian aubergine salad caponata. In
the +,sos, with his partners Joel Dean and Jack Ceglic in the
Manhattan food emporium Dean & De Luca, he would be
one of the proudest proponents of a new style of life in which
balsamic vinegar, sun-dried tomatoes and extra virgin olive
oil, three ingredients that came to symbolize a whole way of
life, were essential.

In the +,,os the ts organization Oldways began promot-

ing the traditional Mediterranean diet, which they dened as
the dietary habits found, until recent times, in olive-produc-
ing areas surrounding the Mediterranean Sea. The Oldways
diet is based on abundant plant foods including fresh fruits
and vege tables, with olive oil for fat and moderate use of dairy
products and sh or poultry. Such eating habits, research has
increasingly suggested, are strongly connected with coronary
health and a lower rate of other diseases. Olive oil is not only
a healthy source of fat, it also contains a high concentration
of antioxidants chlorophyll, carotenoids, and polyphenolic
compounds that help scour away free radicals and preserve
the vitamin E in the oil.
The consumption of olive oil in the United States rose
from o million lb (., million kilos) in +,s., to .o million in
+,,.
o
In the tk .ooo was the rst year that olive sales sur-
passed that of other vegetable oils since, as market analyst
Claire Birks comments, the popularity of olive oil has not only
been helped by its aspirational value, but also by its association
with Mediterranean cooking and the health claims linked with
this way of life.
-
That is a long way from the laxative section on the chem -
ists shelf! Nevertheless, one has to wonder: is it only for health
reasons that olive oil has supplanted butter that French cui-
sine has been discarded in favour of the Mediterranean Diet?
Once, dietary experts advised us to limit the amount of fat we
s.
s,
eat; today, fats are divided between bad (animal) and good
(vegetable).
s
The health benets of the olive may be undeni-
able, but I cannot help thinking that the preference for olive
oil and Mediterranean habits of eating conceals a deeper
demand, a deeper desire.
Olive oil is not merely a type of fat; it stands for an en tire
alternative way of life. More than a mere ingredient, the olive
offers a complete system of values, in which the emphasis is
placed on how the oil is extracted by natural and anci ent
methods that havent changed since antiquity. The artisanal
nature of oil pressing, even though assisted by very modern
technologies, makes olive oil the epitome of the un-pro cessed,
Luca della Robbia, November, The Labours of the Month, +oo, blue,
white and yellow in tin-glazed terracotta.
Harvesting olives in southern Italy.
the symbol of an untouched nature, of an anti-industrial
world in which poor methods and poor food are preferable
to the rich.
Olive oil somehow manages to link us to a very ancient
past, the pure past of the Greeks and the Romans, of Homer
and Virgil, leaping, entirely anachronistically, over centuries
and centuries of modern life, revolutions, bourgeois palates
and aristocratic cuisines drenched in butter. To prefer olive
oil over butter is, one cannot but feel, like preferring mythol-
ogy over history; its a search for a mythic time in some mythic
place uncontaminated by the compromises of life in the here
and now.
Vincent van Gogh, Women Picking Olives, +ss,,o, oil on canvas.
s
s-
Cured olives
The taste of olives depends on when you choose to harvest
them. There are three basic ways to cure olives: a dry salt cure for
black olives, a lye cure and a brine cure for green olives. The rst
recipes for salt or brine curing, still much the same as are used
today in southern Italy, were recorded by the ancient Roman agri-
cultural expert Lucius Junius Moderatus Columella in his treatise
De re rustica (XII).
Curing Green Olives
from Columella, De re rustica
Harvest the olives green before they are completely mature, beat
them with a sharp cane and immerse them in hot water, to release
their bitterness. After you have drained and dried them, put them
in amphorae along with leeks, rue, apio tenero (a plant similar to
celery) and mint, all nely chopped. Last, pour over them wine
seasoned with spices and honey. (Apium graveolens is a plant species
in the family Apiaceae, known as celery.)
Recipes
ss
Curing Black Olives
from Columella, De re rustica
Place the black olives, as yet unripe, in wicker baskets, cover them
with salt and leave them under the hot September sun for ,oo
days to allow them to sweat. After the natural warmth has dried
them off, conserve them in boiled wine must or vinegar mixed
with honey, and cover with a layer of fennel mixed with lentiscus.
To Dry Cure the Tiny, Black French Nyons Olives
This is a modern recipe suggested by Lynn Alley in Lost Arts
Mix the olives with their own weight in non-iodized table salt,
pickling salt or rock salt. Pour them evenly into a pillowcase and
cover them completely with more salt. Put them somewhere so
that any juice that dips from them will not stain. Stir or mix them
well once a week for four weeks (or until they lose their bitter-
ness). When they are no longer bitter, rinse them carefully and
allow them to dry overnight. Then pack them in oil until you are
ready to consume them.
To Brine-cure Green Olives
from Alley, Lost Arts
Some people crack the green olives before putting them in brine.
Otherwise, you simply place your clean green olives in cold water
and change the water each day for ten days. At the end of the ten-
day period, you can make a more permanent brine solution in
which to continue the process. Add + cup of non-iodized salt to
each gallon of water. The water should have enough salt to oat a
raw egg. Use enough of this brine to cover the olives. Change the
solution weekly for four weeks. At the end of four weeks transfer
the olives to a weaker brine solution until you are ready to use them.
This solution should contain cup of non-iodized salt to each
gallon of water.
The olives may take up to two or three months to develop
their avour.
Syrian Recipe for Curing Olives
collected by Charles Perry, expert scholar on the
cuisines of the world, from The Feast of the Olive
by Maggie Blyth Klein
Take olives from Palmyra (black for preference) remove the pits
and mix with cardamom and ground walnuts. Sprinkle with cori -
ander, toasted walnuts and salted lemon, knead together and put
in a jar.
Iraqi Recipe for Curing Olives
Charles Perry, from The Feast of the Olive
Take ripe or green olives (black are better) and crush and salt them.
Turn them over every day until their bitterness disappears, then put
them on a tray of woven sticks for a day and a night until dry.
Pound garlic and dry thyme with an equal weight of walnuts. Put
the mixture on a low re, and put the tray of olives on the same
stone in an oven, close the door, and leave a whole day. Stir several
times so that the aromas circulate. Take out and season with
sesame oil, crushed walnuts, toasted sesame seeds, garlic and thyme.
Bruschetta
Olive oil is essential to one of the most renowned dishes in the
world: bruschetta. The simplest of dishes, it is, when made with the
best ingredients, one of the best. You will nd a version of bruschetta
everywhere around the Mediterranean where olive trees are grown.
In Nice they call it brissa, in Tuscany, fettunta, but the ingredients
are virtually identical everywhere: slices of a large loaf of Italian
country-style bread, garlic and fresh olive oil. In southern Italy,
s,
where this dish remains very popular, dried oregano and perhaps
some fresh tomato chopped in small pieces are also added.
For the basic bruschetta: grill the sliced bread, rub it with the
clove of garlic and drizzle with olive oil.
Salads
Below are two time-honoured olive dishes eaten in Greece and
southern Italy. Olives were part of the daily diet of the peasants,
typically eaten with bread. My recipe comes from Sicily, where farm
workers used to eat it at the end of a hard days work, accompanied
by fresh durum wheat bread. The preparation is called olive cunzate
which means seasoned olives in Sicilian dialect. Today olive cunzate
are normally served as an appetizer, and many cooks can them so
they can be eaten during the winter. The olives must be picked green,
split and allowed to rest for several months in the brine before they
are seasoned.
Green Salad with Olives
Makes . cups (oo g)
+. oz. (,o g) cured green olives
small red onion, sliced
+ stalk celery with some tender leaves, chopped
+ carrot, thinly sliced
+ garlic clove, minced
. tbsp (,o g) dried oregano
+ small hot pepper, chopped
. tbsp (,o ml) wine vinegar
. tbsp (,o ml) olive oil
Rinse the olives to remove excess salt, and shake them dry. Put the
olives in a bowl with the onion, celery, garlic, oregano, and hot pep-
per. Mix with the vinegar and olive oil. Serve at room temperature.
Serves
,o
Roasted Black Olives with Orange Zest
Makes . cups
+. oz. pound (,o g) oil-cured black olives
pinch of brown sugar
+ teaspoon rosemary needles
grated peel of + orange
. garlic cloves, crushed
+ small chilli pepper, chopped
cup olive oil
Strain the olives from the olive oil, add a small dash of olive oil in
to the pan. Then heat them in the pan for at least minutes until they
get nice and shiny. Transfer the olives to a bowl and stir in the brown
sugar, rosemary, orange peel, garlic and pepper. Serve lukewarm.
Serves
Caponata (Sicilian aubergine salad)
from Anna Tasca Lanza, The Heart of Sicily
Caponata, often called Sicilian caviar, is one of the most celebrated
dishes of the islands cuisine. The origins of caponata are unknown,
but the preparation belongs to a large family of aubergine dishes
such as ratatouille from the South of France or moussaka from
Greece. What makes this Sicilian preparation special is the sweet
and sour avouring, which belongs to Sicilian culinary tradition and
goes back to ancient Roman tastes, when the seasoning was made
of the sh sauce garum and honey.
. lb (+ kg) aubergines (eggplants), peeled and cut into +-inch
cubes
oil for frying
salt
+ large onion, sliced lengthwise
' cup (oo ml) olive oil
+ cups (,- ml) tomato sauce, plus more if necessary
,+
,.
+ bunch celery, tough outer ribs discarded, strings removed and
coarsely sliced, then poached
o oz. ( to + cup,+-o g) green olives, stoned and cut into thirds
tbsp (oo g) capers, rinsed and drained
+ tbsp (+ g) sugar, plus more to taste
' cup (oo ml) wine vinegar
hard-boiled eggs, peeled and halved, for garnish
chopped parsley for garnish
Heat one inch of oil in a large saut pan. Fry the aubergine pieces,
a batch at a time, until browned. Drain well on paper towels. Season
with salt.
Saut the onion in the olive oil for about minutes, until just
golden. Add the celery, olives, capers, tomato sauce, sugar, vinegar
and salt to taste. Gently stir in the aubergine, being careful not to
break it up. Simmer for . to , minutes, then transfer to a large bowl
or platter and cool.
Pile the caponata in a pyramid and surround it with hard-
boiled eggs, sprinkle with chopped parsley, and serve cold or at
room temperature. It is even better if made a day before serving.
Serves s to +o
Sauces and Seasonings Made with Olive Oil
Pesto
Ask a Genoese for a recipe for pesto and you will get . . . not a
recipe, but suggestions!
Im afraid I just do it all by eye, says my friend Maria Flora,
based on the consistency of the bunches of basil, the ones with the
small, pointed leaves, from Pra or the western Ligurian Riviera
they vary depending on the season.
In short, pesto is a question of balance and taste. Its like
tomato sauce for southern Italians: everyone has his or her own
recipe; there are hundreds of them, and its all a question of bal-
ancing the ingredients to taste.
For people: large bunches of basil
Clean the leaves by hand, rinse and dry them delicately. You can
use the blender, the mixer or chop the leaves with a knife; once
upon a time pesto was made in the mortar. Before starting to work
on the basil, prepare: or spoonfuls of grated parmesan cheese
and + tbs of aged pecorino, grated, +oo gr. Italian pine nuts (dont
use imported Chinese pine nuts, they are tasteless), one clove of
garlic without the green llet. Add the basil leaves with a pinch or
two of salt to prevent the basil from turning black. The liquid in
the basil will be absorbed by the grated cheeses. Taste to adjust
the salt; pecorino is very salty. Blend all the ingredients with extra
virgin olive oil. Serve trenette or linguine pasta with the pesto,
adding, to the cooking water, one small potato and a small bunch
of green beans per person. Bring the water to the boil, toss in the
green beans, and when they are cooked, put in the pasta and the
potato chopped into cubes.
Now stir some of the water from the boiling pasta into the
pesto. Drain the pasta, put it in another bowl, and pour over the
pesto sauce. Keep the pesto on top; if the hot pasta sits on the
sauce, it can melt the cheese. Add some extra virgin olive oil if
needed. Pesto is also delicious on potato gnocchi and in minestrone
(with simple taglierini pasta made of our, water and salt): when the
soup is cooked, add . or , tbsp of pesto.
Bagna cauda
Bagna cauda is an eighteenth-century recipe from the Piedmont
region of northwest Italy. Its a perfect demonstration of the fact
that cuisine is often the result of trade and exchange between dif-
ferent cultures. In fact two ingredients of this sauce the anchovies
and the olive oil are not native to Piedmont. They are Ligurian,
although it should be noted that once upon a time olive trees also
grew in Piedmont. This dish is the result of trade between Ligurian
shermen and Piedmontese farmers. The sherman would come
up the Piedmontese valleys to exchange salt and salted fish for
,,
,
garlic, butter, cheese and vegetables from Piedmont. Bagna cauda
was traditionally eaten to celebrate the end of the grape harvest and
the new wine. It is rst recorded in a recipe book of +-oo, Il cuoco
piemontese perfezionato a Parigi (The Piedmontese Cook with the Paris
Touch), where it was called the sauce known as the poor mans.
The poor Piedmontese peasants diet usually consisted of what
little grew in his garden and what he could swap with others. Once
upon a time, the only vegetable he had to dip in the sauce were
cardoons (white cardoon from Chieri or around Asti).
of a head of garlic per person
o g anchovies
-o ml olive oil
butter
salt, cardoons, peppers, Jerusalem artichokes, cabbage,
turnips, beetroot etc.
Break the garlic into cloves, peel and remove any green shoots
inside. Place it in a pot, cover with milk and cook until soft (use the
point of a knife to test). Discard the milk, place the garlic on a cut-
ting board and chop roughly. Sprinkle with ne salt and continue
chopping until nely chopped. Place the garlic in oil. Desalt the
anchovies, rinse them in vinegar, dry and chop nely, then add to
the oil and garlic. Heat over a low ame, without allowing the oil
to come to a boil, stirring continuously, until the mixture is fairly
homogeneous. After about .o minutes, dissolve small pieces of
butter in the bagna cauda, and when the butter has melted, send the
sauce to the table, keeping it warm over a spirit ame without allow -
ing it to come to the boil. Dip the vegetables, nely sliced, into the
bagna cauda.
Aioli
Aioli is basically a mayonnaise made with garlic. One of the most
pop ular Provenal recipes, it is usually served with poached veg-
etables.
o fresh garlic cloves
. egg yolks at room temperature
pinch of salt
+ cup (.. ml) extra virgin olive oil
Mash the garlic in a mortar to a paste. Add the salt and one egg yolk.
Stir slowly but rmly, add the second yolk and stir again evenly. Add
the oil drop by drop until the mixture thickens. When the aioli holds
the fork upright it is ready. Serves people. Makes + cup.
Olive Pastes
Together with bruschetta, olive paste is one of the most ancient and
popular recipes using olives in the Mediterranean world. It was ap-
parently sold by street vendors in ancient Athens and served as an
appetizer (gustatio) in Roman banquets. Columella records a recipe
for olive paste made out of very ripe black olives cured with salt
and seasoned with fenugreek, cumin, fennel seed and Egyptian
anise. The name tapenade, which is the Provenal version, comes
from the word tapno, which in Provenal means capers, one of the
main ingredients. Traditionally, tapenade is spread on bread or used
as a topping for pasta. Although olive paste is known as a Provenal
dish, olives are eaten wherever olives grow, and the varieties of
olive paste are as widespread as the ingredients which grow around
the Mediterranean Sea. Along with tapenade, Id like to suggest an
Israeli recipe that probably dates back to Biblical times. What
makes this recipe special is the addition of citron, a sacred fruit for
the Jews, along with some other spices that give this dish a avour
far more oriental than the French tapenade.
,
,o
Black Olive Paste
o g pitted black olives
, tbsp olive oil
+ garlic clove
+ tbsp lemon or citron juice
pinch of cumin, marjoram, parsley and fresh coriander, minced
Grind all the ingredients to a paste in a mortar with pestle, drizzle
in the oil and mix until creamy. Refrigerate overnight and serve at
room temperature.
Tapenade
pound (.. g) green or Kalamata olives
+ tbsp drained capers
.o anchovy llets
. tbsp olive oil
. large cloves of garlic, minced or pressed
dash fresh lemon juice
thyme, rosemary and black pepper to taste
Follow instructions for Black Olive Paste above.
Main Dishes and Side Dishes
Olive ascolane
The most typical dish from the Marches region in Italy, a region
with extensive olive groves. The recipe, named after the capital of
the region, Ascoli, is an old one that dates back to the end of the
nineteenth century. Tender olives preserved in brine with wild fen-
nel seeds and various aromatic local herbs, are stuffed with veal, pork
and prosciutto crudo, along with parmesan cheese and various spices.
,-
+ kg green olives from Ascoli
+o g minced veal meat
+o g minced pork meat
+oo g prosciutto crudo
o g grated pecorino
o g grated parmesan
eggs
tomato paste
breadcrumbs
our
nutmeg
' glass white wine
olive oil, salt and pepper to taste
Brown the veal and pork in oil in a pan, add salt and pepper and
sprinkle with the white wine. When the wine has evaporated,
cover the pan and allow the meat to cook through. Place the pork
and veal in a bowl and add the nely chopped prosciutto, the grated
cheeses, some breadcrumbs, a pinch of nutmeg, the tomato paste
and two eggs. Mix well to form a smooth, thick paste. Pit the olives
and stuff them with the mixture, then roll them in our, pass them
in the remaining two eggs, beaten, and roll in breadcrumbs. Cook
them in very hot oil to cover and serve hot.
Artichoke Hearts and Broad Beans in Oil
from Claudia Roden, A New Book of Middle Eastern Food
This is a Copt recipe eaten during Lent, when these Christians
abstain from any kind of animal food.
o artichokes
juice of + lemon
., tbsp olive oil
+ clove garlic
+ tsp sugar
+ lb (oo g) fresh shelled or frozen broad beans
,s
salt and black pepper
+ tbsp our or cornour
Buy young artichokes, and remove the leaves, stems and chokes. Use
only the hearts. Rub with lemon juice and drop in +o ml ('pint)
water acidulated with lemon to prevent discoloration.
Put the olive oil, garlic, sugar and lemon water in a large pan
with the artichoke hearts. Add the broad beans, and season to taste
with salt and pepper. Add more water to cover if necessary. Simmer
gently over low heat for about minutes, until the artichoke hearts
and beans are very tender and the liquid is considerably reduced.
Mix the our or cornour to a smooth paste with a little cold
water. Add a little of the hot liquid and stir well. Then add this to the
pan gradually stirring constantly. Simmer gently, stirring occasionally
until the sauce thickens and has lost the taste of our (about +
minutes). Pour into a serving dish.
Serve hot as a side dish.
Moroccan Chicken with Cracked Green Olives
from Maggie Blyth Klein, The Feast of Olives
. cups (oo g) cracked green olives
tbsp (oo ml) olive oil
+ chicken ( lb or +.s kg)
salt and pepper to taste
+ tsp fresh ginger, minced
, cloves garlic, minced
+ tbsp cumin seeds, nely ground in a mortar
large pinch of saffron threads, crushed
. cups (oo ml) chicken stock, preferably homemade
red-leaf lettuce leaves or curly endive
cup (oo ml) fresh lemon juice
grated zest of one lemon
Stone the olives, then place in a sauce pan with water to cover. Bring
to a boil and boil for + minutes. Drain and repeat with fresh water,
,,
then drain again (this boiling process makes the olives less bitter,
but dulls their bright green colour). Set aside.
In a large heavy casserole over medium-high heat, warm . tbsp
of the olive oil. Add the whole chicken and brown well on all sides,
about + minutes. Remove from the pan and sprinkle with salt and
pepper. Set aside.
Drain off the fat from the pan. Warm the remaining . tbsp oil
in the same pan over medium heat. Add the ginger, garlic, cumin
and saffron and saut for + minute. Then add the chicken stock and
stir well.
Return the chicken to the pot, cover and cook for +. minutes
on one side. Turn the chicken over, re-cover, and cook for +. min-
utes on the other side. The chicken should be just done; test by
piercing with a knife tip. If it is not ready, cook for a few more min-
utes, and test again.
Arrange a bed of lettuce on a serving platter. Remove the
chicken from the liquid and place it on the lettuce. Add the lemon
juice to the liquid in the pot and reduce over high heat until the
sauce is slightly thickened. Add the olives and heat just long
enough to warm them through. Using a slotted spoon, distribute
the olives over the chicken.
Pour the sauce into a bowl and serve alongside the chicken.
Garnish the chicken with the lemon zest.
Serves
Spaghetti aglio, olio e peperoncino
Spaghetti aglio, olio e peperoncino, spaghetti with oil, garlic and
chilli, is universally Italian. It is by far the most popular dish of pasta
in southern Italian families. This is a last-minute dish you can whip
up on your return from a weekend out of town, when the refriger-
ator is empty. No Italian home is ever without the ingredients.
There are two schools of thought about the garlic: those who
fry it in the oil and those who like to add it raw. My only rule is to
be sure all the ingredients are fresh. You cannot make this pasta
with stale garlic and the olive oil must have a pungent taste; in fact,
+oo
new olive oil is perfect. Rather than dictate xed amounts of ingre -
dients, let me just give you the overall picture. I would chop a couple
of cloves of garlic and + small chilli pepper together and let them
simmer in a cup of olive oil for at least an hour. Then, after the
pasta has been cooked and drained, I would pour it into a bowl with
the seasoned oil, and stir. Eventually I might add a tablespoon of
grated pecorino. Thats it!
Broccoli with Black Olives
from Anna Tasca Lanza, The Heart of Sicily
around . lb (+ kg) broccoli
+ small onion, minced
cup (+. ml) olive oil
cup (- g) cured black olives, stoned and sliced
salt
black pepper
cup (o g) grated pecorino or parmesan
lb (.o g) mozzarella, shredded (optional)
Cut the broccoli into -cm (.-inch) orets and boil in well-salted
water until al dente, about minutes, then drain. Meanwhile, saut
the onion in half the olive oil until slightly golden, . to , minutes.
Remove the pan from the heat and add the olives. Set the mixture
aside.
Preheat the oven to +,oc,-r. Oil an s x +. inch baking
dish with about + tbsp of the olive oil.
Spread out the broccoli in the dish and mix in the onion and
olive mixture. Add the remaining olive oil, if desired. Add salt and
pepper, remembering that the olives and the cheese you will be
adding may be salty. Toss the broccoli with about half of the peco -
rino and top with mozzarella, if desired. Sprinkle the remaining
pecorino on top. Bake for about .o to ,o minutes, until the top is
nice and golden. Serve warm or at room temperature.
Serves to o as a side dish
Olive Focaccia
For the dough:
, cups (oo g) semolina our
+ tbsp (+. g) fresh yeast
+ cup (+,o ml) water
cup (+. ml) olive oil
cup (+. ml) white wine
tbsp salt
For the topping:
cup (+oo g) black olives, stoned
. sprigs rosemary
drizzle olive oil
pinch of sea salt
Make a well in the our, add the yeast, and start adding water (about
-o ml) to dissolve the yeast, mixing with your hands. Mix in the olive
oil until incorporated, then mix in the wine until incorporated,
and add more water. Add the salt and add more water if necessary.
Knead the dough for about s minutes (it will be quite sticky), then
transfer to a large oiled bowl and let rise, covered with a towel, in
a warm place for about ,o minutes.
Preheat oven to .ooc.
Place the dough in a large round springform pans and let rise
for another +o minutes. Pat dough with your ngertips to make
dimples in the dough. Place pitted olives on dough, sprinkle with
rosemary and sea salt, and drizzle with olive oil. Bake for about
o minutes, until golden.
Moroccan Lamb Tagine with Prunes and Olives
from Maggie Blyth Klein, The Feast of Olives
This is a typical Moroccan tagine with its sweet and sour avour
that emerges from the contrast between the prunes and the bitter-
ness of green olives. You serve it over bulgur wheat or couscous.
+o+
+o.
, tbsp olive oil
, lb (..- kg) lamb shoulder, trimmed of fat and
cut into bite-size pieces
+ tsp salt
pinch of saffron threads, crushed
good pinch of cayenne pepper
+ heaped tsp nely chopped fresh ginger
teaspoon ground cinnamon
+ yellow onion, half minced and half thinly sliced
. cloves of garlic peeled and chopped
cup large brine-cured black olives, Moroccan or Amssa for
preference
pound (.. g) prunes, pitted and plumped in warm water
+ tbsp sesame seeds, lightly toasted
+ tsp honey
+ bunch fresh coriander, chopped
. tbsp unsalted butter
. tart apples, peeled, cored and sliced
Warm the olive oil in a heavy casserole over medium-high heat,.
Add the lamb and saut, using tongs to turn the pieces so that they
brown on all surfaces. Add the salt, saffron, cayenne, ginger, cin-
namon, minced onion, garlic and water to cover. Stir well, bring to
a simmer and cover and cook over medium-low heat until tender,
about + hour.
Add the olives, prunes, sesame seeds, honey, coriander leaves,
and sliced onion and stir well. Re-cover and continue to simmer
for minutes to blend the avours. Meanwhile, in a a skillet over
medium heat, melt the butter. Add the apple slices and saut, turn-
ing once, until soft, about +o minutes total cooking time. Transfer
to a serving dish and decorate with the sliced apples.
Serves s
+o,
Melomakarona (or Phoenika)
from Lynn Alley, Lost Arts
These are traditional Greek Christmas cookies. They are some-
times called phoenika after the Phoenicians, who arrived in Greece
and Sicily around the eighth century rcr. Today, some cooks pre-
fer to substitute butter for olive oil. But once upon a time, the fat
used was always olive oil. This recipe makes approximately two
dozen cookies.
Cookies
, cup (o g) plain (all purpose) our
+ cup (.+o g) semolina our
cup (-o g) sugar
. tsp baking powder
zest from + orange, zest from + lemon
+ tsp ground cloves
+ tsp ground cinnamon
+ cup olive oil
+ cup fresh orange juice
cup (++o ml) brandy
Sugar syrup
+ cup (.oo g) sugar
+ cup (,o g) honey
. cups (o ml) water
+ stick cinnamon
o whole cloves
+ whole nutmeg, crushed
+ strip orange peel
+ strip lemon peel
Topping
+ cup (++ g) chopped walnuts
. tsp nely ground cloves
+o
Mix the dough by combining the our with the semolina, sugar,
baking powder, grated citrus rinds and spices with olive oil, orange
juice and brandy. Shape the dough into a ball, cover it and let it sit
for half an hour. Preheat the oven to +,oc,or. Take a table-
spoonful of dough and shape it into a an oval cookie, place it on
a cookie sheet and lightly press with a fork. Bake for . minutes or
until lightly browned.
While the cookies are baking combine the sugar, honey, water,
spices and citrus peel in a sauce pan and bring to a boil. Simmer
for about +o minutes, until the mixture is somewhat thick. Strain
the sugar syrup and place in a bowl. Remove the cookies from the
oven and allow them to cool completely. Dip each cookie quickly
in the sugar syrup and place on the cookie sheet. Quickly sprinkle
with chopped walnuts and ground cloves.
Cassatelle
This is one of the most popular cookies from the eastern part of
Sicily. It was a sweet for hard times, when ordinary people didnt
have much to eat and had to make do with the few ingredients to
hand. Ricotta was always considered the cheese of the poor
because it was obtained from the whey left over from cows or
ewes milk after the curd had been extracted to make the primary
cheese. The whey was ri-cotta, or re-cooked, and thus yielded the
familiar creamy cheese. The pastry, too, is made of surprisingly
simple ingredients, but it is also delicious! It is important to use
plentiful oil in the frying.
+ ' cups (,- ml) white wine
' cup (+. ml) olive oil
+ lb (oo g) semolina our
pinch of salt
' pound (.o g) ricotta
o tbsp (,o g) sugar
+ tbsp (+ g) cinnamon, plus more for garnish
icing (confectioners) sugar, for garnish
+o
Heat the wine and oil together until warm (not hot). Pile up the
our and make a well in the centre. Add the wine-oil mixture and
salt, then carefully work it in and knead together.
Stir together the ricotta, sugar and cinnamon, and set aside.
Take a piece of the dough and put it through a pasta machine
on the widest setting. Roll the dough through the machine about
times at this setting, folding the dough in half before rolling it.
When it is very smooth, move the dial to the next narrower set-
ting and roll it through . to , times more, folding it before rolling
it. Move the dial to the third setting and roll it through . or ,
more times.
On a oured work surface, lay out the sheet of dough and cut
out circles with a +o-cm (, -inch) cookie cutter. Place a spoonful
of ricotta lling just off-centre, then moisten edges of dough and
fold over. Pinch to seal. Repeat with remaining dough and lling.
Heat cm (+ 'inches) of olive oil and deep-fry the cookies,
ipping occasionally, until deep golden, about , minutes. Drain on
paper towels, then sprinkle with the icing sugar and cinnamon.
Serve warm.
+oo
There are hundreds of different varieties of olive trees. Some
cultivars are very closely related, almost identical, distinguished
only by their slightly different names; some vary one from anoth-
er much more widely. At times a single variety may be known by
different names in different places, even within one country.
Olives vary according to their appearance, growing characteris-
tics, size, oil content, taste, chemical qualities, ripening time and
many other factors. I have listed only a few varieties per country.
Spain
Arbequina, a small, golden-brown olive from Catalogna, is used as
a table olive and for olive oil, which has a buttery and peppery aroma.
Cornicabra, from Castille and Mancha, produces a strong, aromatic
oil with a distinct bitterness and a suggestion of pepper in its bite.
Empeltre is a medium-sized black olive from Aragon, used both
as a table olive and to produce a high-quality olive oil. It has a
ripe, red apple and fresh fruit aroma.
Empeltre (II), mostly grown in Catalonia, is used for olive oil as
well as black table olives. It has a sweet taste with aromas of fresh
fruit and almonds.
Appendix: Olive Varieties
Hojiblanca, or white leaf in Spanish, is a green to purple medi-
um-sized olive with rm pulp from Andalusia. Rich in vegetable
avour, it is used to make olive oil despite its low oil content.
Morisca, from Estremadura, is a highly productive variety, with
big pulpy fruit and a high oil content. It is also used as a green
table olive.
Picual, the most important Spanish cultivar, is a medium-sized
black olive used to produce olive oil. It has a spicy, fruity and
slightly bitter avour, an aroma of fresh herbs and owers and a
high oil content.
Picudo, a small purple olive, is highly productive and makes
excellent olive oil (the one from Baena is considered the best). It
is also cured as a table olive.
Italy
Bianca, Bosana and Tonda olive cultivars from Sardinia pro-
duce a green olive oil with a hint of bitterness and aromas of arti-
choke and dandelion.
Carolea, Coratina and Ogliarota from Campania produce a
dense, fruity and golden olive oil.
Dolce Agogia, from Umbria, is a medium-sized green to purple
olive with medium oil content; it is used also to make sun-dried
black olives.
Frantoio, a cultivar grown in central Italy, is highly productive
and makes a very fruity olive oil.
Leccino, grown in Umbria and Tuscany, produces a small black
table olive with low oil content.
+o-
Moraiolo and Raggiola, from Umbria, produce an olive oil
with a slightly fruity avour and a peppery kick; its aroma is rem-
iniscent of artichokes and it has a very smooth, uid texture.
Nocellara del Belice is a Sicilian variety that is pulpy, green and
medium sized. It is excellent for the table and makes good oil.
Taggiasca, a green medium-sized olive from Liguria, produces
olive oil with a sweet avour and delicate texture.
Greece
Kalamata, a large, black olive with a smooth, meaty taste, is used
as a table olive.
Portugal
Galega produces olive oil that has a very low natural acidity, deli-
cate texture and avour reminiscent of fresh fruit and herbs, with
aromas ranging from almonds and sugar to spices.
France
Aglandau from Aix-en-Provence produces olive oil with a slight
bitterness and an aroma of almonds and hazelnuts.
Cailletier from the Massif de lEsterel and Nice produces a very
rened, light, yellow olive oil with a delicate and slightly sweet
avour and a bouquet reminiscent of almonds, acacia and
hawthorn.
Rougette from Ardeche produces a very distinctive olive oil with
a woodland aroma and slightly herbal avour with a suggestion
of fruits.
+os
Picholine and Sabina from Corsica produce a green olive oil
with an herbal bouquet slightly suggestive of green vegetables
and a peppery, ery bite.
Croatia
Oblica is a pulpy, green medium-sized olive; it produces an
excellent olive oil with a rened texture, and table olives both
black and green.
Tunisia
Chemlali de Sfax, Chetoui, Gerboui, Meski, Oueslati: these
varieties produce an olive oil that is greenish in colour with a
wonderful aroma and a avour reminiscent of fresh fruit with a
tinge of bitterness.
Turkey
Izmir Sofralik is a bright, pulpy, medium-sized green olive and
makes a good table olive. This is an old cultivar grown in the
region of Smyrna.
Memecik, a medium-sized olive grown, is used as a table olive
and for olive oil. It has a high oil content and is very fruity.
Israel and Palestine
Nabali from Galilee and Israel is one of the oldest olive cultivars
in the Middle East, sometimes called the Roman olive. It is used
both as a table olive and for oil. The olives, which have a high oil
content, are plump and soft.
+o,
United States
Mission olives, from California and Texas, are oval and medium
in size. The skin of the Mission olive turns deep purple but
changes to jet-black when ripe. It is used both for pressing of oil
and as a table olive.
Chile
Azapena or Sevillana de Azapa can range in size from medium
to large and may be picked as a green olive but is most often vio-
let black when harvested for the table. The fruit has an elongat-
ed shape and a thin outer skin covering a very eshy inner meat.
It is grown as a table olive to be served as a complement to food.
++o
+++
1 The Ancient Roots of the Olive
+ Sandro Vannucci, Storia dellolio, in Lulivo e lolio (Milano,
.oo,), pp. .o-+.
. Maggie Blyth Klein, The Feast of the Olives: Cooking with
Olives and Olive Oil (San Francisco, c:, +,,), p. ,.
, Vannucci, Storia dellolio, p. ,..
Pliny the Elder, The Natural History, ed. John Bostock and
H. T. Riley (London, +s), Book \, chap. ,.
Vannucci, Storia dellolio, p. .
o Massimo Montanari, Il sacro e il quotidiano. La cultura
dellolio nel Medioevo europeo, in Il dono e la quiete il mare
verde dellolio, ed. Paolo Anelli (Perugia, +,,,), pp. -+ and
Massimo Montanari, Olio e vino, due indicatori culturali,
in Olio e vino nellalto Medioevo (Spoleto, .oo-), pp. +oo.
- Massimo Mazzotti, Enlightened Mills: Mechanizing Olive
Oil Production in Mediterranean Europe, Society for the
History of Technology, (.oo), pp. .--,o.
2 Ointment, Anointments and
Holy Oil: The Olive in Ritual
+ Fernand Braudel, The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean
World in the Age of Philip II (London, +,-.), p. ..
References
++.
. Giancarlo Baronti, Lolio e lolivo nelle tradizioni popolari,
Museo dellOlio e dellOlivo (Perugia, .oo+), p. +..
, John Boardman, The Olive in the Mediterranean: Its
Culture and Use, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society,
London, .- (+,-o), p. +,..
Columella, On Agriculture, , vols, trans. Harrison Boyd Ash,
E. S. Forster and Edward H. Heffner (Boston, +,+).
Paolo Branca, E fa crescer per voi lolivo e le viti e
ogni specie di frutti: Vino e olio nella civilt Arabo-
Mussulmana in Olio e vino nellalto Medioevo (Spoleto, .oo-),
pp. o-+-oo.
o Cristina Acidini Luchinat, Olivo e olive. Immagini
dallAntichit al Rinascimento, in Olivo, tesoro del mediterraneo
(Florence, .oo), p. +,,.
- Maguelonne Toussaint-Samat, History of Food, trans. Anthea
Bell (Oxford, +,,-), p. .+.
s Claudia Roden, A New Book of Middle Eastern Food
(London, +,so), p. ,..
3 Harvesting, Pressing and Curing
+ Andrew Dalby, Cato: On Farming (Totnes, Devon, +,,s),
chap. so.
. Don and Patricia Brothwell, Food in Antiquity: A Survey of the
Diet of Early Peoples (London, +,o,), p.
, Antonio Carpuso and Sara De Fano, Lolio di oliva dal mito
alla scienza (Roma, +,,s), p.
Maguelonne Toussaint-Samat, A History of Food, trans.
Anthea Bell (Oxford, +,,), p. .+o.
Dalby, Cato: On Farming, ch. o.
o Pliny the Elder, The Natural History, ed. John Bostock and
H. T. Riley (London, +s), book \.
- Cato and Varro, On Agriculture, trans. W. D. Hooper and
Harrison Boyd Ash (Boston, +,,).
s Archestrato di Gela, I piaceri della mensa (frammenti 330 a.C.)
(Palermo, +,s-), p. ,.
++,
, Dalby, Cato: On Farming, chap. ++,.
+o Brothwell and Brothwell, Food in Antiquity, p. o.
++ Maggie Blyth Klein, The Feast of the Olives: Cooking with
Olives and Olive Oil (San Francisco, c:, +,,), p. +,.
+. Giovanni Enrico Agosteo, La manifattura dellolio doliva
in Sicilia: dalla raccolta delle olive allestrazione dellolio, in
La Sicilia dellolio (Catania, .oos), pp. +,o.
+, Jean-Louis Flandrin, Le gout et la ncessit: sur lusage des
graisses dans les cuisine dEurope occidentale (i\\iii),
in Annales conomies, Socits, Civilisations, ,s (+,s,), pp.
,o,o+.
4 The Olive Meets the New World
+ Judith M. Taylor r, The Olive in California: History of an
Immigrant Tree (Berkeley, c:, .ooo), p. ..
. Simone Cinotto, Una famiglia che mangia insieme, cibo ed eticit
nella comunit italoamericana di New York, .,.o.,,o (Turin,
.oo+), p. ,.-.
, Mario Puzo, quoted ibid., p. ..
Ibid., p. ,,..
Sandro Vannucci, Storia dellolio, in Lulivo e lolio (Milano,
.oo,), p. oo.
o Maggie Blyth Klein, The Feast of the Olives, Cooking with
Olives and Olive Oil (San Francisco, c:, +,,), pp. +s+,.
- Mort Rosenblum, Olives: The Life and Lore of a Noble Fruit
(New York, +,,-), p. .,o.
s Taylor, The Olive in California, pp. o+.
, Ibid., p..
5 Good Fat and Bad Fat:
The Mediterranean Diet
+ Simone Cinotto, Una famiglia che mangia insieme, cibo ed eticit
nella comunit italoamericana di New York, .,.o.,,o (Turin,
.oo+), p. +-.
. Anne Meneley, Like an Extra Virgin, American
Anthropologist, ci (.oo-), p. o-,.
, Piero Camporesi, Le vie del latte (Milan, +,,,), pp. +o-s.
Meneley, Like an Extra Virgin, p. o-,. Certainly, as Dr
Daphne Miller writes, the high polyphenol content of olive
oil can partially explain why it is so heart healthy. But Llus
Serra-Majem PhD, a researcher at the University of
Barcelona in Spain, offers some additional reasons why
olive oil is so terrific for your health. After administering
diet questionnaires to +,ooo adults in Spain, he discovered
that people who ate a lot of olive oil were more likely to eat
green vegetables, whole grains and fish while people who
steered away from olive oil were more likely to eat sweets,
processed cereals, refined breads and foods high in refined
vegetable oils and animal fats. What did this mean? Did
olive oil just happen to be an innocent bystander in the
success of the Cretan diet? Perhaps it was just a food that
was preferred by people who happened to make other
healthy food choices. See more in Miller, The Jungle Effect
(New York, .oos), p. ++,.
David Kamp, The United States of Arugula (New York, .ooo),
p. .+-.
o Meneley, Like an Extra Virgin, p. o-,.
- Olive Oil Sales Boom in tk Shops, BBC News, +, January
.ooo.
s The discussion is now shifting on to how fat is made:
if cold pressed, organically grown, first press, with no
contaminants, or, in the case of animal fat, what they are
fed with. See Miller, The Jungle Effect.
++
++
Alley, Lynn, Lost Arts (Berkeley, c:, +,,)
Angelici, Renzo, ed., Lulivo e lolio (Milan, .oo,)
Archestrato di Gela, I piaceri della mensa (frammenti 330 a.C)
(Palermo, +,s-)
Boardman, John, The Olive in the Mediterranean: Its Culture
and Use, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, London, B,
cci\+s-,6 (+,-6)
Branca, Paolo, E fa crescere per voilolivo e le viti e ogni
specie di frutti. Vino e olio nella civilt arabo-mussulmana,
in Olio e vino nellalto Medioevo (Spoleto, .oo-)
Braudel, Fernand, The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in
the Age of Philip II (London, +,-.)
Brothwell, Don and Patricia, Food in Antiquity: A Survey of the Diet
of Early Peoples (London, +,6,)
Cato and Varro, On Agriculture, trans. W. D. Hooper and Harrison
Boyd Ash (Boston, :, +,,)
Carpuso, Antonio and Sara De Fano, Olive Oil: From Myth to Science
(Rome, +,,s)
Caruso, Tiziano, and Gaetano Magnano di San Lio, La Sicilia
dellolio (Catania, .oos)
Cinotto, Simone, Una famiglia che mangia insieme cibo ed etnicit nella
comunit italoamericana di New York, .,.o.o,o (Turin, .oo+)
Ciuffoletti, Zero, ed., Olivo, tesoro del mediterraneo (Florence, .oo)
Select Bibliography
++o
Columella, On Agriculture, trans Harrison Boyd Ash, E. S. Forster
and Edward H. Heffner, , vols (Boston, :, +,+)
Dalby, Andrew, Cato: On Farming (Totnes, Devon +,,s)
Flandrin, Jean-Louis, Le gout et la ncessit: sur lusage des
graisses dans les cuisine dEurope occidentale (i\\iii),
in Annales conomies, Socits, Civilisations, ,s (+,s,)
Glazer, Phyllis, Gusti, alimenti e riti della tavola nellAntico e nel Nuovo
Testamento (Casale M., +,,)
Klein, Maggie Blyth, The Feast of the Olive (San Francisco, c:,
+,,)
Knickerbocker, Peggy, Olive Oil from Tree to Table (San Francisco,
c:, +,,-)
Marchetti Lungarotti, Maria Grazia, ed., Museo dellolivo e dellolio
(Torgiano, .oo+)
Mazzotti, Massimo, Enlightened Mills: Mechanizing Olive Oil
Production in Mediterranean Europe, Society for the History
of Technology, (.oo)
Miller, Daphne, The Jungle Effect (New York, .oos)
Montanari, Massimo, Olio e vino, due indicatori culturali,
in Olio e vino nellalto Medioevo (Spoleto, .oo-)
Pliny the Elder, The Natural History, ed. and trans. John
Bostock and H. T. Riley (London, +s)
Rosenblum, Mort, Olives: The Life and Lore of a Noble Fruit
(New York, +,,6)
Tasca Lanza, Anna, The Heart of Sicily (New York, +,,,)
Toussaint-Samat, Maguelonne, History of Food, trans. Anthea Bell
(Oxford, +,,-)
++-
The Olive Blog
A blog about olives and olive oil
www.theoliveblog.com
The International Olive Council
www.internationaloliveoil.org
The Olive Oil Source
Different varieties of olives
www.oliveoilsource.com/page/olive-varietals
Olive oil cultivars around the world
www.frantoio-bo.it/cultivar.aspx
The Australin Olive Oil Association
www.australianextravirgin.com.au
The Hunter Olive Association, New South Wales
www.hunterolives.asn.au
Associazione Italiana dellIndustria Olearia
www.federalimentare.it/docassitol.html
Indian Olive Association
www.indolive.org
Websites and Associations
++s
California Olive Assocation
Information about chemicals in olives
http://oehha.ca.gov/Propo/pdf/BMcFarland%.oCA%.oOliv
e%.ocomment.pdf
Napa Valley Olive Growers
http://napavalleyolivegrowers.com
++,
I would like to thank Frederika Randall for her valuable guidance,
her suggestions, patient support and meticulous editing; Arlyn
Balke, who was at the origin of this passionate olive adventure;
Francesca dAndrea, Mary Taylor Simeti and Kate Wislow for
their observations and patience in reading the manuscript; Daphne
Miller, Lauren Bennet, Fabio Parasecoli, Giuseppe Barbera and
Paolo Inglese for being there when I needed them; Maria Flora
Giubilei for her delightful pesto recipe; Guy Ambrosino for his
beautiful photos; Domenico Musci for his research on bagna cauda;
Lynn Alley, Claudia Roden and Maggie Blyth Klein for letting me
use some of their recipes; and my father for his unyielding pride
in me!
Acknowledgements
The author and the publishers wish to express their thanks to the
below sources of illustrative material and/or permission to
reproduce it.
Guy Ambrosino: pp. +o, +,, +o, ,+, , , s, ,, o+, s+, s;
Giuseppe Barbera: p. .; Bardo Museum, Tunis, Tunisia: p. -,;
Bigstock: p. -s (Anna Smirnova); Trustees of the British Museum,
London: pp. .o, ,; Reproduced from the collection of the Butte
County Historical Society, Oroville, California: p. -,; Reproduced
from the photograph collection of the California History Section
of the California Sate Library, Sacramento, California: p. -.; Indi-
anapolis Museum of Arts, Indianapolis: p. -; Istockphoto; p. o
(Juanmonio); Reproduced from the collections of The Library of
Congress Prints and Photographs Division, Washington rc: pp. ,,
., o-; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York: p. s; Museo
dellolivo e dellOlio, Torgiano, Italy: pp. ,, +, ,,, ,o, ,s, ,,, ,;
Museo dell Opera Metropolitana, Siena, Italy: p. ,; The National
Gallery, London: p. o,; Ariane Sallier de la Tour: p. ,o; Victoria and
Albert Museum, London: p. s,; Yale Center for British Art, New
Haven, Connecticut: p. .o.
+.o
Photo Acknowledgements
+.+
Achilles ,-
aioli ,, , ,
Al-Ghazali +
Al-Idrisi .,
Aladdin +
America oo-, -o, -,, sos.
California ,, oo,, -+,
,.
amphorae see olive oil vessels
Apollo (and Artemis) s,
Arab, Arabian +, .,, +
Archestratus -
Athena +,.o, .,
athletes s, +,.o, .o, ,, ,s,
Babylon, Babylonians s, +o,
,o
bagna cauda , ,,
Birks, Claire s.
Boardman, John ,s,
Braudel, Fernand ,o
bruschetta ,, s,,o
butter, versus olive oil ,++,
.,, ., -, o,, s.,
see also Mediterranean Diet
Camporesi, Piero --
canning -+
caponata ., s., ,+.
Carpuso, Antonio s
Carter, Howard o
cassatelle .o, ++, +o
Castelvetro, Giacomo .
Cato s, -, +, -s, oo
Christianity s, ,, ., ,+-,
+o
anointment of kings ,
exorcism and cures, use
of oil in ,-
fasting, olive oil in .,
o.
Holy Cross Day ,
holy oil from relics s, ,-
Mary ., ,,
sacraments, use of oil in
s, ,, .
Claesz., Pieter, Still-life o,
Columella ,-, s-s
Copts, Coptic
cultural identity s, .,
.,,o, o,-+, -o-
Index
italic numbers refer to illustrations; bold to recipes
+..
curing olives -, soo, ,,,
-., ss,o
David, King ,, ,
Dean & De Luca -,so
Democritis of Abdera ,-
Ducco di Buoninsegna, The
Entry of Christ into Jerusalem
,,
Durrell, Laurence +.
Egypt, Egyptian s,, +,
+-+s, ,., ,-s, o, ,
-s, -
Ehmann, Freda -+, ,,
Etruscan ,, .+, ,-s, -
Fertile Crescent ++, .,
Flandrin, Jean-Louis o.
France ++, +., ., .-, ., o,
so, s.
Provence ,, .-, , o.
Gabriel .
Garden of Gerusalem o,
Garden of Gethsemane .,
Great Britain o, os,
Greece, Greek s, ++, +, +,
+,.+, .-, ,., ,-,, ,
o-, oo, -, -s, so, s
Crete +, +o+-, ,o, -,
Hammurabi +o
Hesiod +s
Homer s, +s, ,-, -, s
Odysseus s, +s
Hotz, Robert Lee -o
Islam o+, --
see also Mohammed
Italy ,, +, .+s, ,+, ,, ,o,
., s, o, oo, oo, -o,
-, -s
Florence .o, .-, .
Genoa .o
Pantelleria ., .,
Siena .
Tuscany ,, .o, .-, o, o., o,
Umbria
Venice, Venetians .o
see also Rome, Romans
Jacobus de Voragine, The
Golden Legend ,-
Joel ,,
Judaism ,.,, ,, o
Promised Land, oil in ,,
Keys, Dr Ancel and Margaret
-,so
Leone, Adelaide .,
Luchinat, Cristina Acidini .
Luther, Martin o.
Mahaut, Countess o
Martini o, oo, -
Mary ., ,,
Notre Dame des Oliviers
., ,,
Mediterranean Diet ,, o,
-os, ,
melomakarona ++, +o,
Mexico o-s
missionaries o-s, o,, o,
Mohammed +
monks .-, o-s, o,
Montanari, Massimo .
Nausicaa +s, ,-
Neptune and the Four Seasons ,,
Nicholas of Myra ,-
Noah ++o, ,.,, ,.
nostalgia s, ., -o-+, s
among Italian-Americans
-o-+
Odysseus s, +s
Oldways s.
Olea Europa +.+
wild (oleaster) +.+, .,
olive etymology +
olive focaccia ,, +o+
olive harvest ,., , ,,,
.o, ,,, ,,, ,., ,
olive oil
anointment with , s, +s,
.,, ,., ,- see also
Christianity
cosmetic use s, +s, .+, .,,
,o, , -, -
extraction methods -,
,, ,,, ,o, ,., o.
in lighting +-, +s, .+, ..,
., .o, .-, .,, o+, , os
medicinal use .., ,o, o,
+, o,, -,so
nutritional benefits s.
quality -, ,
in soap ., ,,, o., os
as status symbol s, .,,
,-, o., o,
in textiles .o, .-, os
in tombs ,, +-, .+, ,-, ,,,
o, -
vessels +o, .,, .o, .., ,,, ,-,
,, ,,o, ,,
see also Mediterranean Diet,
individual religions
olive tree -, s
age of -, ,o, ,+
being born under s
cultivation of +..s, ,+,
oos, o,, -
geography and climate
+.+
olive varieties +os+o
olive wood, symbolism of s,
,, ,o
Holy Cross Day ,
protection against evil ,
Palestine +s, ,., ,, .
Tel Mique-Ekron +s, ,o, +
pesto ,, ,.,
Phoenicia, Phoenicians +s+,,
,,, -
Pliny the Elder s, .., ,,, -,
, o
scale of oil quality ..,
Plutarch ..
Poseidon +,
Puzo, Mario o,-o
Ramses ii +-, o
recipes
aioli ,, , ,
Artichoke Hearts and
Broad Beans in Oil ,-s
+.,
bagna cauda , ,,
Black Olive Paste ,o
To Brine-cure Green
Olives ss
Broccoli with Black Olives
.o, +oo
Bruschetta ,, s,,o
Caponata ., s., ,+.
Cassatelle .o, ++, +o
Curing Black Olives
(Columella) ss
Curing Green Olives
(Columella) s-
To Dry Cure the Tiny,
Black French Nyons
Olives ss
Green Olive Salad o.,
,o
Iraqi Recipe for Curing
Olives s,
Melomakarona (or
Phoenica) ++, +o,
Moroccan Chicken with
Cracked Green Olives
,s,
Moroccan Lamb Tagine
with Prunes and Olives
+o+.
Olive Ascolane ,o-
Olive Focaccia ,, +o+
Pesto ,, ,.,
Roasted Olives with
Orange Zest o., ,+
Spaghetti aglio, olio e
peperoncino ,,+oo
religion see individual
religions, tombs
Robbia, Luca della,
November ,
Rockefeller Foundation
report -,so
Rome, Romans ,, .+,, .,
,so, , -, +,
so.
Romulus and Remus s
Rosenblum, Mort -o
Russia .-
Sargent, John Singer, The Olive
Grove ,,
Saul, King ,
Shakespeare, William .,
Shannon, L. R. o
Sophocles .,, ,+
strigil ,,
symbolism, of the olive
fertility ,+,
natural way of living s,
peace .,, ,+, ,,, ,, ., o
purity ,+, .
rebirth ,+
strength .,, ,+, ,-, .
symposium .+
Syria ++, s,
Tarkington, Booth, The
Magnificent Ambersons oo
taxation, oil in payment of ..
Taylor, Judith M. os
Theophrastus +
Tomassetti, Giampaolo ,,
Toussaint-Samat, Maguelonne
, .
Tudor Pattern Book, The .o
+.
Tunisia oo
Tutankhamen +-, ,,, o
Van Gogh, Vincent s, ,
Varro, Marcus Terentius o
Vettori, Pier ,., o.
+.